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Acknowledgements: Notice of correction: It has come to our attention that the paper "Individualism-collectivism and job satisfaction between Malaysia and Australia" by Fauziah Noordin and Kamaruzaman Jusoff published in the International Journal of Educational Management , Vol. 24 No. 2, 2010, did not reference a previous paper entitled "Career commitment in collectivist and individualist cultures: a comparative study" by Fauziah Noordin, Trevor Williams and Catherine Zimmer, published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management , Vol. 13 No. 1, 2002, which the authors drew upon in their research. The authors and Emerald sincerely apologise for this.
1. Introduction
Culture influences an individual's responses to the environment. Culture is rooted in the values shared by members of a human group. Cultures differ in the extent to which goals, co-operation, competition, relationships, and individualism are emphasized. Since [18] Hofstede's (1980) comprehensive study of work values across cultures, his conceptualization of cultural differences in terms of individualism-collectivism has been widely used to explain differences in work attitudes, especially in comparative studies of Asian and Western nations. A widely accepted idea is that Asians are collectivists, with the self-identified with an in-group, while Westerners are individualists, with the self-distinct from the in-group. Although this assumption is generally accepted at a conceptual level, evidence of the effect of individualism-collectivism on specific responses at an empirical level is lacking ([8] Cole, 1979; [74] Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1985, [76] Randall, 1993). This paper reports a study on individualism-collectivism and job satisfaction among managers in the different cultural environments of Malaysia and Australia.
2. Individualism-collectivism
The dimension of individualism-collectivism refers to the relationship one perceives between one's self and the group of which one is a member. [18] Hofstede (1980) describes members in individualistic societies as self-centred, competitive rather than co-operative, having low loyalty for the organizations they work for, pursuing their own goals, having a low need for dependency upon others, and being calculative. Members of the collectivistic societies, on the other hand, have a "we," rather than "I" orientation, have high loyalty for the organization and work toward its goals, interact with each other in an interdependent mode, and take action jointly as a group in a co-operative fashion rather than on an individual competitive basis, thus subscribing to the...