Committing to Work at the Expense of Other Life Pursuits: The Consequence of Individuals’ Relative Centrality of Work Across Job Types and Nations Differing in Performance Orientation

Abstract

Relative centrality of work (RCW) is defined as the psychological importance given by individuals regarding work relative to the importance they attach to other major domains of living. Prior evidence has been inconclusive in terms of how RCW might influence the life satisfaction (LS) of individuals. Hence, in this study, we hypothesize that this relationship is regulated by an individual’s current job features (job complexity [JC]) and national culture concerning work (performance orientation [PO]) independently and jointly. On the basis of representative samples of 23,622 employees from 33 nations, we find that the RCW–LS relationship is negative when JC is low. By contrast, high JC eliminates but does not reverse this negative trend. This two-way interaction only exists when employees simultaneously live in a nation whose culture stresses performance improvements and achievement of rewards from work, that is, nations with high PO. Although an individual’s national–cultural context does not moderate the RCW–LS linkage, it functions by making work relative to other life domains (RCW) and job characteristics (high JC) highly important in deriving satisfaction from one’s life.

Keywords

relative centrality of work work centrality life satisfaction job complexity performance orientation

“It is the working man who is the happy man.

It is the idle man who is the miserable man.”

—Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

“There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement,

Only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal

To quit work, and for our wages at the end.”

—William James, “What Makes a Life Significant” (1900)

Everyone must work. However, to what extent an employee should invest in work remains unclear. On one hand, the quote from Franklin suggests that putting emphasis on work is worthwhile as work conforms to human nature, brings us a sense of meaning and achievement, and contributes to the common good (e.g., MOW International Research Team, 1987). On the other hand, the opposing viewpoint presented by James suggests that work is burdensome and enervating—a means that merely serves one’s other goals in life—and that it should not be central in living a significant life (e.g., Guest, 2002).

Parallel to these opposing opinions, two different recommendations have emerged from the literature. The first recommendation revolves around work importance constructs, such as the Protestant work ethic (e.g., Furnham, 1984) and “Work as a Calling” (e.g., Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997), and argues that work investment and efforts are beneficial to one’s well-being. Individuals’ emphasis on work indicates their work dedication and achievement, which then elevates their life satisfaction (LS) by gratifying specific needs for achievement and self-enhancement (e.g., Judge & Watanabe, 1993). In comparison, the literature on work–family balance (e.g., Greenhaus, Collins, & Shaw, 2003) has shown that those who highly engage in life domains other than work, especially family, enjoy a high quality of life.¹ One study even argued that the support, solidarity, and affection provided by nonwork life domains are even more essential to human survival and flourishing than work (Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010).

One reason for these divergent findings is that researchers have followed different ways to conceptualize and investigate work. The first research stream focuses on individuals’ investment or satisfaction, exclusively targeting work. By contrast, the second research stream compares work with other major life domains, especially family, to examine work’s relative contribution toward satisfying individuals’ needs in the full context of life-as-lived.

While examining work, scholars have also neglected the specific job and national contexts wherein individuals are embedded. For instance, in the time of William James, workers made a living by laboring on repetitive assembly lines in industrialized workplaces. Therefore, James’s pessimism toward work could have been influenced by his observations of how workers are confined by their dehumanized and manually routinized jobs in a sociohistorical context that advocates work instrumentality. By contrast, Franklin’s words are likely to reflect his own life pursuits and his personal experience at work. Franklin made significant and widely heralded achievements in various fields requiring creativity, including politics, physics, journalism, and city planning, in an 18th-century America that rewarded pioneering spirit and innovations at work.

We selected the concept of relative centrality of work (RCW) as our focal construct to address these contrasting viewpoints about work in the human experience. We examined RCW’s relationship with individuals’ LS, along with a situational variable characterizing their extant jobs (i.e., job complexity [JC]) and a national contextual variable regarding work (i.e., performance orientation [PO]). We employed these variables as moderators in the RCW–LS relationship. Here, we followed MOW International Research Team (1987) and Schwartz (1999) in defining RCW as the psychological importance given by individuals regarding work relative to their attachment to other major domains of living, including family, friends, leisure, religion, and politics. Compared with earlier practices that either emphasized individuals’ attitudes or experiences toward work or merely contrasted work with family, RCW has the merit of considering the psychological importance assigned by an individual across many life domains. Thus, RCW reveals the value of work in an individual’s total life space as a component of his or her Lebenswelt (England & Misumi, 1986; Q. Lu, Huang, & Bond, 2016; MOW International Research Team, 1987).

This study aims to make three important contributions by establishing such a model. First, by examining the relationship between RCW and LS across employees from representative nations around the globe, we deepen prior explorations of work by spotlighting work against the backdrop of an individual’s overall life profile. We propose that such a construct highly reflects individuals’ life priorities and the extent to which they value work-oriented lives (MOW International Research Team, 1987).

Second, in so doing, we also go beyond the past LS (or broadly, well-being) literature to identify a new contributor, namely, RCW. Specifically, although one relevant strand of literature has emphasized how individuals’ various work-related values (i.e., Protestant work ethic, Furnham, 1984), demands (e.g., Kramer & Chung, 2015) or experiences (i.e., feelings of job control, Gonzalez-Mulé & Cockburn, 2017; work engagement, Schaufeli, Taris, & van Rhenen, 2008) influence their well-being, another strand has used individuals’ achievement from work (i.e., job satisfaction, Judge & Watanabe, 1993; compensation/income, Diener, Sandvik, Seidlitz, & Diener, 1993) to predict their cognitive life evaluations, that is, LS. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has examined how individuals’ RCW contributes to their LS as one type of valuing that reflects life priorities.

Third, JC and the national–cultural variable of PO constitute contextual influences at different levels, with JC indicating influence from individuals’ immediate working context and PO indicating work value endorsement at a highly distal societal level. An integration of JC and PO thus advances the traditional usage of the person–culture congruence model or, broadly, the person–situation fit literature, to explain the emergence of LS (e.g., Bond, 2013; Oishi, Diener, Lucas, & Suh, 1999). To the best of our knowledge, prior scholars have merely suggested that contexts are important in the processes leading to individual well-being. However, whether context at different levels would function differently in an individual process remains unclear (Mowday & Sutton, 1993). This knowledge is important to researchers and pivotal to practitioners in multinational firms as they need to consider employees’ personal preference (i.e., RCW) and national working cultures (i.e., PO) in designing corporate policies and job characteristics to improve employees’ well-being.

RCW

RCW is defined as an individual’s judgment of the importance of work in relation to other life domains, including family, friends, leisure, religion, and politics (e.g., MOW International Research Team, 1987). Thus, RCW captures the extent to which individuals’ life options are focused upon work relative to other domains of living. Accordingly, we posit that individuals with high RCW are likely to embrace work-oriented lives. These individuals tend to set up important life goals that can only be achieved via this life domain (i.e., basic living, financial independence, career success, and self-fulfillment) and derive increased satisfaction from what they obtain and/or experience in work. By contrast, individuals with low RCW tend to marginalize work-related tasks and treat nonwork domains as highly central to their life interests (Ros, Schwartz, & Surkiss, 1999).

The term “work” in RCW refers to paid employment by which individuals obtain monetary or other forms of compensation from transforming their human capital, that is, intellectual and manual labor, into fulfilling particular sets of tasks and responsibilities (Edwards & Rothbard, 2000). We treat RCW as an employee’s relative emphasis upon work amid several competing domains of individual activity because the investment of an individual in any life domain is not absolute. We believe that life is a trade-off that requires individuals to deploy their limited time, energy, personal resources, and competencies in those life domains, which best enable them to realize their personal goal profiles (Q. Lu et al., 2016). At the same time, a relative assessment highly reflects their life priorities vis-à-vis work.

This conceptualization has precedents. In the early 1950s, Dubin (1956) focused on the relative importance of the workplace among the “central life interests” of individuals. He developed a 40-item measurement scale to describe the embeddedness of work within other life domains. This fit-of-work into other life domains echoes Mannheim’s (1975) definition of work centrality:

. . . the relative dominance of work-related contents in the individuals’ mental processes, as reflected in responses to questions concerning the degree of concern, knowledge, and interest invested in the work role relative to other activities and in the individuals’ emphasis on work-related sub-identities. (p. 81)

RCW differs from numerous contemporary constructs, such as job involvement, workaholism, and work–life balance. Specifically, job involvement refers to the degree to which an individual is cognitively preoccupied with, engaged in, and concerned with his or her present job; situational stimuli have often been found as the major predictor of job involvement (Diefendorff, Brown, Kamin, & Lord, 2002; Paullay, Alliger, & Stone-Romero, 1994). By contrast, RCW refers to the degree of importance of work or paid employment in the overall life of individuals, and its formation is likely to be shaped by individuals’ early socialization (Harpaz & Fu, 1997; Q. Lu et al., 2016).

RCW and workaholism share meaning in terms of the tendency of individuals to consider work as a central life interest. However, RCW reflects the value of work in an individual’s overall life profile, whereas workaholism focuses on behavioral patterns, that is, the discretionary time spent in work activities and work beyond organizational requirements, as well as the generalized thinking of individuals about work (Harpaz & Snir, 2003; Scott, Moore, & Miceli, 1997). Finally, work–family balance has been measured in various ways (e.g., Wayne, Butts, Casper, & Allen, 2017), but all these operationalizations have failed to consider the role of other life domains (see, for example, Goldberg, 2010) in contributing to an individual’s well-being. Thus, RCW is highly responsive to each person’s distinctive goal profile and cultural socialization in shaping his or her LS.

England and Misumi (1986) and the MOW International Research Team (1987) project made the earliest endeavors to investigate RCW by comparing work centrality levels across national, occupational, age, and gender groups. In terms of nation, Japan showed the highest work centrality, followed by Yugoslavia, Israel, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain. In terms of occupation, chemical engineers and self-employed individuals demonstrated the highest work centrality, followed by teachers, textile workers, tool and dye makers, unemployed individuals, white-collar workers, retirees, students, and temporary workers. Senior and male employees reported higher work centrality than young and female employees, respectively. With representative samples from the Israel labor force in 1981, 1993, and 2006, Sharabi and Harpaz (2011) found that the gender gap on RCW scores has diminished due to the increasing participation rate of women in the labor market and their occupation of higher rank positions in organizations. In another study that compared the relative centrality of different life domains among Jews and Arabs in Israel, Sharabi (2014) found that Jews ranked family first, followed by work and leisure, whereas Arabs ranked work first, followed by family and leisure. In addition, Q. Lu et al. (2016) examined personal work attitudes, “Work as Good,” and one contextual variable, independence at work, as two predictors of RCW in a multinational context. Their findings revealed that RCW is predicted pan-culturally by nation-level “Work as Good.” Moreover, a nation’s self-directedness (i.e., self-determination and independence) and its civility (i.e., tolerance and benevolence toward others) can strengthen such an effect.

RCW and LS

Individuals who place a relatively higher value on work indicate that work-related concerns are important to them and that they can derive a high level of ego gratification from job fulfillment. Compared with nonwork domains (e.g., family, friends, leisure, politics, and religion) that give individuals satisfaction in the domains of interpersonal relationships, love, and entertainment (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010), work brings secure financial resources and additional meaningfulness and provides a vehicle for individuals to exercise competence and independence (Schwartz, 1999). Prior research has found that high RCW individuals are likely to get involved with their jobs. These individuals hold highly positive job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction), as well as achieve better job outcomes (e.g., job performance and income) (for a review, see Kostek, 2012).

The spillover model of work–life balance asserts that an individual with positive job attitudes is likely to accumulate positive experience in other life domains (i.e., family). The reason is that the affective benefits inherent in positive job attitudes could be transmitted to those nonwork domains and enhance their functioning (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006). In addition, positive job outcomes also provide individuals with ample physical and psychological resources to support their other life pursuits and satisfy their various needs for survival, esteem, and self-worth. Thus, RCW facilitates individuals’ prosperity in nonwork domains and eventually promotes their overall LS via mechanisms such as spillover and needs gratification.

Evidence has been accumulated to partially support this RCW–LS linkage. For instance, Baruch and Barnett (1986) found that paid employment could significantly predict individuals’ self-esteem, a constituent of their hedonism. In a similar vein, Adams, King, and King (1996) revealed that individuals with high work involvement tend to enjoy a high level of LS via the mediating role of job satisfaction. In addition, the work–life balance literature has recorded that a positive spillover from work to other domains (especially family) is also beneficial to individuals’ well-being. Specifically, J.-F. Lu, Siu, Spector, and Shi (2009) found that work–family enrichment as a positive spillover is positively related to individuals’ LS. In another study, Gareis, Barnett, Ertel, and Berkman (2009) identified a similar result pattern for work–family enrichment to predict individuals’ mental health and LS. Thus, it is plausible to deduct that RCW is positively associated with LS.

Alternatively, telic theories of subjective well-being seem to offer a different perspective. The central idea of such theories is that certain goals serve as important reference standards or yardsticks for the affect system of individuals so that the process and outcome of pursuing certain goals become pivotal to individual hedonism (Diener, 1984; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Specifically, these theories assert that individual commitment to goals could provide a sense of personal agency and a sense of structure and meaning to daily life, implying that the process of pursuing some goals is more satisfying than pursuing other goals (Cantor & Sanderson, 1999). Besides, these theories also assert that the fulfillment of certain goals can meet intrinsic human needs, whereas that of other goals is extrinsic in nature and could only bring short-lived hedonism (Kasser & Ryan, 1993).

Following the logic, we could posit that individuals putting work as a relatively important life domain report low LS. First, when work has become a central life goal and a guiding principle for individuals to organize their lives, work-centered individuals can only gain satisfaction at work, yet lose a big chunk of possibility from the other sources of satisfaction. Prior research, however, has found that the biggest universal predictor of human happiness is the quality of a person’s social relationships which resides in nonwork life domains (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Second, work can be meaningful and personally relevant, yet at the mundane level, work presents the daily experiences of constrained working conditions, difficult tasks, and unpredictable work consequences; moreover, work outcomes are usually periodic and include intrinsic rewards mixed with extrinsic desires (i.e., wealth, power, and fame; Kasser & Ryan, 1993; Ros et al., 1999). Thus, an emphasis on work is an inappropriate arena for individuals to seek happiness and achievement of basic goals in living.

In support of this reasoning, Kasser and Ryan (1993) found that respondents who prioritize financial success over self-acceptance, community feeling, and affiliation (which is similar to work-centered life values or high RCW) tend to report a low level of well-being. Alternatively, in the work–life balance literature, Greenhaus et al. (2003) found that individuals’ quality of life is the highest if they engage more in their family than in work. Carlson and Kacmar (2000) showed that family is a stronger predictor of life than of work satisfaction, implying that the satisfaction derived from domains other than work could be more relevant to individuals’ overall life evaluation. Furthermore, Judge and Watanabe (1993) used structural equation modeling to examine the possible causality between job satisfaction and LS, finding that the influence of job satisfaction on LS is apparent when both are measured at the same time, but that such influence is short-lived. Across a long span of time (i.e., 5 years), this influence wanes and becomes insignificant. On the basis of these research findings and theorizing, we can also hypothesize that RCW is negatively correlated with LS.

Given that the above perspectives and empirical evidence are rather divergent, we offer no hypothesis about the relationship between RCW and LS. Instead, we focus on how this relationship is regulated by JC and PO in the below section.

First-Order Moderating Role of JC

We cast JC as one of the contextual variables because compared with job features (i.e., task autonomy), JC encompasses a broader spectrum of job contents that allow individuals to execute their talents in a fulfilling way at their workplace (Shaw & Gupta, 2004). In addition, JC has important implications in facilitating the goals of individuals performing complex jobs, who are more likely to earn higher salaries and attain higher social status compared with those performing simpler jobs (Agarwal, 1981).

JC refers to the complexity and enrichment of tasks in a certain job or work (Shaw & Gupta, 2004). Although complex jobs are often highly difficult, their provision of discretion, variety, and opportunities to execute one’s talents can enhance the self-efficacy and perseverance of individual workers (e.g., Shalley, Gilson, & Blum, 2009; Valcour, 2007). Consequently, complex jobs are often regarded as more challenging, interesting, and engaging than simpler ones.

Given that JC provides valuable incentives, such as enriching job content and variety, individuals tend to experience high levels of achievement, recognition, and satisfaction when performing complex work (Tierney & Farmer, 2002). Moreover, highly complicated work procedures allow individuals to utilize their skills and talents well and to become highly competent, focused, and persevering. When these individuals perceive their work as challenging, they draw on additional resources to steer their work experiences toward positive outcomes while feeling a sense of accomplishment when performing their jobs (Huang, Chiaburu, Zhang, Li, & Grandey, 2015). Consequently, the well-being of individuals with high RCW depends on what types of tasks they perform and whether their jobs could offer high levels of achievement and positive experience (Man & Lam, 2003). By contrast, JC is not that pivotal to those individuals who embrace nonwork life domains as their central life interests.

In addition, performing complex jobs requires high levels of interpersonal and technical skills (Man & Lam, 2003). Those who conduct highly complex jobs tend to be well educated (Avolio & Waldman, 1990), earn high salaries (Agarwal, 1981), attain high social status (Wilk & Sackett, 1996), and are likely to achieve or progress toward financial independence and self-fulfillment. As a result, JC fulfills work-related needs and life goals, which are important considerations for those who put work at the center of their lives (i.e., employees high in RCW).

In sum, people with high RCW give high value to work, satisfy work-related needs, and achieve work goals as a central part of their life. Therefore, the effect of RCW on LS shall be positive when JC is high because individuals’ current jobs could offer them bountiful intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. By contrast, when JC is low, the RCW–LS relationship becomes negative. On one hand, low JC disconfirms people who consider work as a relatively important life domain (i.e., high RCW) and constrains their self-expression at work. On the other hand, low JC also endorses those people with low RCW that work is indeed boring and enervating and that their nonwork-oriented life options are correct.

In other words, our theorizations implicate that putting relatively increased weight on work merely suggests the importance of work for individuals’ judgments of happiness and LS. However, the type of work that individuals perform and the direct experience and outcomes that work engenders can eventually confirm whether their work–life option is fulfilling and worthwhile (Oppenheim-Weller & Kurman, 2017). We thus expect that JC positively moderates the relationship between RCW and LS.

Hypothesis 1 (H1): JC moderates the relationship between RCW and LS such that this relationship is positive when JC is high and is negative when JC is low.

First-Order Moderating Role of PO

Aside from the influences from individuals’ immediate work context, another potentially important layer of context is the national culture to which individuals belong (Mowday & Sutton, 1993). Developed by House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta (2004) as a novel cultural dimension regarding work, PO refers to the extent to which a society facilitates and advocates its members to meet high working standards (Javidan, 2004). The history of PO dates back to the proclamations made by Martin Luther and John Calvin that each aspect of our working life could serve as mediums to glorify God and to Max Weber’s assertion of “good work” as a path to human salvation. Subsequently, McClelland’s (1961) need for achievement and Hofstede’s (2001) concept of masculinity/femininity constitute the modern foundations of this new concept. In the two conceptualizations, work is considered as a tool to satisfy the psychological pursuits of individuals or a society’s collective programming on work importance.

Given that PO favorably reflects the working cultures of a society, performance-oriented societies have been posited to value attributes such as valuing tasks in the workplace, rewarding people for their performance improvement, and emphasizing training and development. Javidan, House, Dorfman, Hanges, and de Luque (2006) verified the distinctiveness of this concept from the five dominant cultural dimensions (i.e., power distance, masculinity, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation) from Hofstede’s (2001) framework. Subsequent scholars also employed PO as an important variable for their different levels of analyses. For several national-level studies, PO has been linked to other national indices (e.g., Bond et al., 2004). For instance, PO has been found to promote economic growth (Minkov & Blagoev, 2009) and the participation of women in political leadership (Bullough, Kroeck, Newburry, Kunda, & Lowe, 2012) and simultaneously shorten the life expectancy of individuals (Javidan, 2004). Furthermore, by employing PO as an antecedent of the behaviors and attitudes of individuals, Autio, Pathak, and Wennberg (2013) found that such a construct is positively correlated with the entrepreneurial entry behaviors of individuals, thus suggesting that those individuals living under performance-oriented cultures tend to perceive the legitimacy of entrepreneurial endeavors and consider themselves successful by performing such actions. Finally, PO may also function as a contextual variable that regulates individual processes. Gentry, Weber, and Sadri (2008) found that PO strengthens the positive relationship between managers’ mentoring behaviors and their performance rated by bosses, indicating that performance-oriented cultures view mentoring behaviors that aim to elevate workers’ job performance and career progress as highly recommendable. In addition, Sturman, Shao, and Katz (2012) found that poor performers are likely to resign voluntarily in a high-performance–oriented culture, a finding that is consistent with the person–culture match hypothesis.

Given the previous research showing that individuals become satisfied once their attributes or preferences are endorsed by the broad national context, we hypothesize that PO moderates the RCW–LS linkage. The reason is that PO stands for a social–institutional context that emphasizes work and constitutes a direct confirmation to those people who put work as their central life interest (Javidan, 2004). As a result, individuals tend to be happy as they find their values and preferences recognized and endorsed under such a cultural context. Put differently, because people with high RCW find themselves prototypical in high PO societies, they are likely to experience feelings such as “feel right” as most people surrounding them tend to similarly put work as their central life interest (Fulmer et al., 2010). Another reason is that individuals who put work as an important life domain relative to others tend to be independent and focus on self-fulfillment and self-interest pursuits (MOW International Research Team, 1987); these characteristics align well with the main principles (i.e., the endorsement of agency motives and desires for achievement) inherent in the concept of PO. This person–culture alignment validates individuals’ daily life experience and, in turn, boosts their hedonism from making such work–life options.

On the basis of these two reasons, we thus hypothesize the following:

Hypothesis 2 (H2): PO moderates the relationship between RCW and LS, and this relationship is positive when PO is high.

Second-Order Moderating Role of PO

Aside from its direct moderating role in the RCW–LS relationship, PO may also regulate the interactive effect from JC via an individual process linking RCW to LS (Mowday & Sutton, 1993). Two reasons exist for this hypothesis. First, JC refers to influences from individuals’ immediate job context, whereas PO indicates influences from a distal national context. Their residence at different levels creates opportunities for their joint work. Second, as a distal cultural variable, PO encompasses contents that endorse individuals’ work-centered life options (which constitute the foundations for the direct moderating role of PO in the RCW–LS linkage), and it includes elements that stress the fulfillment of work-related values from their current employment (Javidan, 2004). Thus, PO is theoretically relevant to the interaction of RCW and JC to predict LS. Accordingly, we hypothesize that in a culture that attaches additional value to the pursuits of work in the fulfillment of various life goals and the satisfaction of various life needs, the positive influence from engaging in complex work activities can be reinforced. By contrast, if the national culture places little importance on the pursuits of work-centered values from one’s current employment, the positive influence from JC can be attenuated.

Specifically, PO functions by legitimizing individual work-oriented life pursuits and confirming the fulfillment of their work-centered values. Thus, under such cultural contexts, the effect of JC on individuals with high RCW is likely to stand out. By contrast, in a national context characterized by low PO, such an interactive effect shall be downplayed. In addition, PO and JC share much homology in terms of advocating work and building up environments supporting work. Nevertheless, their differences are that JC focuses on situational suppliers of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards (Shaw & Gupta, 2004), whereas PO emphasizes value recognitions and preference endorsement (Javidan, 2004). Therefore, when PO is coupled with complex jobs to constitute multiple layers of context, we suspect that PO can function complementarily to enhance the effect from JC on LS. We thus propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3 (H3): PO moderates the interactive effect of RCW and JC on LS, and this interactive effect emerges only when PO is high.

Based on the given theorizations, our research model is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The hypothesized research model.

Method

Participants

We used data from the World Value Survey Wave 5 (WVS-5, www.worldvaluessurvey.org) and the Global Leadership & Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE, www.globeproject.com) research program to test our research model. The WVS intends to study changing values and their impact on social and political life. WVS-5, which was collected from 2005 to 2008 across 57 countries and regions, includes three variables of interest: RCW, LS, and JC. Alternatively, the GLOBE research program studied organizational culture, as well as the societal and cultural attributes of effective leadership in 62 nations. This project lasted from 1994 to 2004 and included one national-level index, PO.

Given that only 35 surveyed countries in the GLOBE Project overlap with WVS-5, the national samples from 22 countries in WVS-5 and 27 countries in the GLOBE research program had to be excluded. In addition, we deleted data from respondents who were unemployed (i.e., retired, student, or housewife) or who failed to report our focal research variables (i.e., RCW, LS, and JC). As a result, 23,622 respondents from 33 countries, with a mean age of 39.86 (SD = 12.23), were included in the final analysis (for specific details regarding each country included, see Table 1).

Table 1.

Demographics for the National Samples in the Analysis.

Country	Count	Percentage of total sample	Mean age (SD)	Women (%)	Education (%)	Performance orientation
Argentina	521	2.2	39.31 (13.54)	41	34	6.35
Australia	832	3.5	43.32 (12.84)	51	79	5.89
Brazil	652	2.8	37.80 (12.34)	49	24	6.13
Canada	1,090	4.6	42.37 (12.67)	55	70	6.15
China	804	3.4	42.16 (12.00)	44	49	5.67
Finland	510	2.2	42.01 (11.98)	50	40	6.11
France	493	2.1	39.09 (10.79)	47	44	5.65
Georgia	468	2.0	43.22 (12.88)	39	65	5.69
Germany	812	3.4	41.54 (10.74)	54	31	6.01
India	733	3.1	39.61 (12.36)	16	65	6.05
Indonesia	1,029	4.4	38.29 (12.23)	33	70	5.73
Iran	1,011	4.3	34.31 (10.98)	19	53	6.08
Italy	513	2.2	42.26 (11.23)	41	67	6.07
Japan	545	2.3	44.55 (12.58)	45	82	5.17
South Korea	568	2.4	39.17 (10.76)	37	93	5.25
Malaysia	700	3.0	33.85 (10.40)	38	44	6.04
Mexico	760	3.2	37.03 (12.47)	28	54	6.16
Morocco	962	4.1	36.36 (12.03)	47	20	5.76
The Netherlands	485	2.1	38.58 (11.48)	48	37	5.49
Poland	399	1.7	38.97 (11.20)	42	57	6.12
Russia	991	4.2	39.25 (11.97)	50	51	5.54
Slovenia	480	2.0	39.34 (10.52)	41	38	6.41
South Africa	1,212	5.1	38.45 (10.89)	40	67	4.92
Spain	580	2.5	38.76 (11.54)	39	44	5.80
Sweden	655	2.8	44.61 (12.03)	47	89	5.80
Switzerland	731	3.1	46.20 (11.57)	52	51	5.82
Taiwan	826	3.5	40.18 (12.18)	44	65	5.74
Thailand	1,155	4.9	43.44 (13.26)	48	26	5.74
Turkey	511	2.2	34.50 (10.52)	21	56	5.39
Egypt	1,048	4.4	40.91 (10.90)	21	60	5.90
The United States	651	2.8	42.15 (12.61)	45	60	6.14
Great Britain	530	2.2	39.49 (12.71)	46	49	5.90
Zambia	365	1.5	33.63 (10.28)	38	44	6.24

Note. Education: the percentage of individuals receiving tertiary school education.

Assessment Measures

Individual-level variables

RCW

We employed the six items from WVS-5 to measure an individual’s RCW. These six items cover individuals’ importance ratings on six major domains of living, namely, family, friends, leisure, politics, work, and religion. We used a 4-point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all important, 4 = very important).

Following the equation used by Q. Lu et al. (2016), we computed RCW by dividing a respondent’s rating of work importance by the importance scores summed across all six domains. This ratio of importance scores controlled the focal individuals’ overall life engagement (i.e., the sum of all six domain importance scores; Greenhaus et al., 2003), thus allowing us to overcome the response bias arising from individuals’ propensity to be positive in rating the importance of life domains. In this study, the individual RCW values ranged from 0.05 to 0.44.

LS

LS was assessed in the WVS-5 by using the following item inquiring about participants’ satisfaction with overall life: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days? (1 = completely dissatisfied; 10 = completely satisfied).” Although one single item of LS can be criticized for its reliability and validity constraints, a construct that is narrowly defined and straightforward in meaning still has face validity and can thus be directly used in multicultural research (Gardner, Cummings, Dunham, & Pierce, 1998).

JC

Two questions from the WVS functioned as the two facet measures of JC. The first question, Creative Versus Routine, was assessed by the item, “Are the tasks you perform at work mostly routine or mostly creative tasks?” using a 10-point scale ranging from 1 (mostly routine tasks) to 10 (mostly creative tasks). The second, Cognitive Versus Manual, was assessed by the item, “Are the tasks you perform at work mostly manual or mostly cognitive tasks?” (1 = mostly manual tasks; 10 = mostly cognitive tasks). The internal reliability of these two items ranged from 0.11 (in Egypt) to 0.76 (in Spain), with an average Cronbach’s alpha of .57 (SD = 0.09) across all nations.² The scores on these two items were summed to provide a score for an individual’s JC.

National-level variables

PO

This index was directly derived from Javidan’s chapter in House et al.’s (2004) book on the GLOBE Project. According to his introduction, the practice of rewarding performance improvement and setting challenging goals are two items used to identify the practices on how strongly a community gives encouragement and rewards (for national scores of this cultural dimension, refer to Table 1).

Demographic covariates

We included age, gender, and education as individual-level controls as they have been demonstrated as correlates of subjective well-being (SWB) in prior research (e.g., Lun & Bond, 2016). At the national level, we controlled individualism/collectivism and power distance as sociocultural covariates and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as socioeconomic covariate.³ Prior research (e.g., Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995; Diener et al., 1993; Diener & Suh, 2003) found that in nations characterized by high individualism, great wealth, and low power distance, workers tend to enjoy a high level of LS. Individualism versus collectivism and power distance were extracted from the GLOBE Project report in 2004 and GDP per capita from the World Bank report in 2009.

Analytical Strategy

Given that this study employed variables at different levels, a multilevel analysis in hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to test the research model. Specifically, to work with multilevel analysis and obtain standardized coefficients, we group-mean standardized all variables at the individual level, including the focal variables (i.e., RCW and JC) and controls (i.e., age, gender, and education), and grand-mean standardized all relevant variables at the national level (i.e., PO, collectivism vs. individualism, power distance, and GDP per capita).

Next, the analyses of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) on our dependent variable, LS, revealed a significant amount of variance at the national level, ICC(1) = 0.14, ICC(2) = 0.99, F(32, 23589) = 117.83, p < .01. These statistics suggested that 86% of the variance in individual LS resided within nations and 14% between nations. Chi-square test, $χ^{2} (32) = 3784.54, p < . 01$ , revealed that the national variance term significantly differed from zero. Thus, groups differed significantly in terms of average LS, justifying our use of a multilevel analysis.

Results

Multilevel Analysis

We conducted multilevel analysis after calculating the descriptive statistics and correlations among all variables of interest (Table 2). In our analysis, we first entered all control variables and the focal variable, RCW in Step 1. In Step 2, we entered JC, PO, and their interactions with RCW to examine H1 and H2. Finally, in Step 3, we entered a three-way interaction among RCW, JC, and PO to test H3.

Table 2.

Means, Standard Deviations, and Pearson Correlations Between Variables of Interest.

	M	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6
1. Relative centrality of work	0.19	0.03	—
2. Job complexity	4.79	2.62	−.10**	—
3. Life satisfaction	7.04	2.06	−.08**	.15**	—
4. Age (in years)	39.86	12.23	−.02*	.03**	.01	—
5. Gender	0.41	0.49	−.07**	.06**	.04**	−.02**	—
6. Education	0.54	0.50	−.09**	.29**	.06**	−.11**	.03**	—
			7	8	9	10
7. Performance orientation	5.85	0.34	—
8. Collectivism (vs. individualism)	4.66	0.51	.28	—
9. Power distance	2.73	0.31	−.35*	−.17	—
10. GDP per Capita (in USD)	18,665	17,402	−.01	−.36*	−.33	—

Note. Values below the diagonal show the correlations. Gender (“0” = male; “1” = female). Education (“0” = presecondary school; “1” = postsecondary school). Sample size = 23,622 respondents in 33 countries. GDP = gross domestic product.

p < .05. **p < .01.

Our analysis results in Step 1 (see Model 1 of Table 3) showed that RCW has a negative relationship with LS ( $β = - . 08, p < . 01$ ).

Table 3.

Multilevel Analysis in Predicting Life Satisfaction.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Main effects:
Individual level
Intercept	7.02** (0.13)	7.00** (0.12)	7.00** (0.12)
Age	0.00 (0.03)	−0.00 (0.03)	−0.00 (0.02)
Gender	0.01 (0.02)	0.00 (0.02)	0.00 (0.02)
Education	0.12** (0.03)	0.07** (0.03)	0.07** (0.03)
Relative centrality of work (RCW)	−0.08** (0.02)	−0.07** (0.02)	−0.07** (0.02)
Job Complexity (JC)		0.13** (0.03)	0.13** (0.03)
National level
Performance orientation (PO)		0.09 (0.12)	0.10 (0.12)
GDP per capita	0.36** (0.10)	0.44** (0.09)	0.44** (0.09)
Collectivism (vs. individualism)	0.02 (0.12)	0.06 (0.11)	0.06 (0.11)
Power distance	−0.14 (0.16)	0.02 (0.11)	0.02 (0.11)
Interactive effects:
Two-way interactions
RCW × JC		0.03* (0.01)	0.03* (0.01)
RCW × PO		0.02 (0.02)	0.02 (0.02)
JC × PO			−0.05* (0.02)
Three-way interaction
RCW × JC × PO			0.03* (0.01)

Note. All numbers in the parentheses are standard errors. Sample size = 23,622 respondents in 33 countries. GDP = gross domestic product.

p < .05. **p < .01.

Interactions with JC

As revealed by Step 2, JC ( $β = . 03, p < . 05$ , in Model 2 of Table 3) positively moderates the relationship between RCW and LS ( $slope = - 0.10, p < . 01$ , in low JC; $slope = - 0.04, p < . 10$ , in high JC). Specifically, Figure 2 shows that low JC highly matters for the RCW–LS relationship. Among those with manual and routine jobs, RCW has a strong negative effect on LS. Alternatively, when JC is high, the negative influence from RCW to LS becomes weak but is still marginally significant. Our H1 is thus partially supported.

Figure 2.

Interaction between RCW and JC on the prediction of LS.

Interactions with national culture

As indicated in Step 2, PO ( $β = . 02, n . s .$ , in Model 2 of Table 3) does not moderate RCW and LS despite its effect sign being on the same direction as we hypothesized. Thus, H2 is not supported.

Interactions with JC and national culture

Consistent with H3, PO moderates the effect of JC on the relationships between RCW and LS in Step 3 ( $β = . 03, p < . 01$ , in Model 3 of Table 3). The results plotted in Figure 3 reveal that JC only moderates the relationship between RCW and LS in high PO cultures ( $slope difference = 3.39, p < . 01$ ), but not in low PO cultures ( $slope difference = 0.00, n . s .$ ). Specifically, in high PO cultures, RCW negatively predicts LS for low JC ( $slope = - 0.11, p < . 01$ ), but is unrelated to LS for high JC ( $slope = . 01, n . s .$ ). By contrast, in low PO cultures, RCW negatively predicts LS for low ( $slope = - 0.09, p < . 05$ ) and high JC ( $slope = - 0.09, p < . 01$ ). This finding, on one hand, demonstrates the pivotal role of national cultures in regulating the influences from individuals’ immediate work contexts (i.e., JC) to the RCW–LS relationship; on the other hand, it shows that only when a culture has a strong emphasis on high performance and individuals are involved in complex jobs could RCW lose its negative effects upon individuals’ LS.

Figure 3.

Interaction between RCW, JC, and PO on the prediction of LS.

To corroborate the findings, we deleted all controls in our analysis and obtained basically the same results. Therefore, we are confident in our reported results.

We also show country-by-country results on how RCW, JC, and their interaction terms predict LS. As the analysis suggests, the results showed great national variations in the interactive effects of RCW and JC, with more significantly positive interactive effects found in high PO countries such as India, Finland, and Malaysia, and less significant effects in low PO countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland (see Table 4). Thus, the general model is confirmed more strongly in certain national contexts than in others and would not be confirmed at all had the study been conducted mono-culturally, for example, in South Africa or Japan.

Table 4.

Summary of the Basic Regression Equations in Each National Sample.

Country	Adjusted R²	Standardized regression coefficients						Adjusted R²	Country
Country	Adjusted R²	Relative centrality of work (RCW)	Job complexity (JC)	RCW × JC	RCW × JC	Job complexity (JC)	Relative centrality of work (RCW)	Adjusted R²	Country
Argentina	.05**	−0.12**	0.09	0.08^†	0.02	0.30**	−0.13**	.16**	Morocco
Australia	.03**	−0.08*	0.14**	0.01	−0.04	0.15**	0.01	.01^†	The Netherlands
Brazil	.01^†	−0.04	−0.12**	0.04	0.01	0.09	−0.05	.00	Poland
Canada	.01*	−0.02	0.05^†	0.05	−0.02	0.20**	−0.04	.07**	Russia
China	.02**	−0.03	0.09*	−0.06	0.05	0.19**	−0.03	.05**	Slovenia
Finland	.02**	0.01	0.10^†	0.09*	−0.02	0.13**	−0.09**	.03**	South Africa
France	.08**	−0.11*	0.13**	0.03	0.03	0.04	0.04	.01	Spain
Georgia	.02*	−0.04	0.09^†	−0.06	−0.04	0.07	0.05	.01	Sweden
Germany	.03**	−0.08*	0.08*	0.03	0.00	0.11**	−0.00	.01^†	Switzerland
India	.03**	−0.02	−0.02	0.08*	0.06^†	−0.00	0.00	.01**	Thailand
Indonesia	.03**	−0.01	0.01	−0.03	0.02	0.18**	−0.06^†	.04**	Taiwan
Iran	.02**	−0.06^†	0.10**	0.04	0.04	0.07	0.07	.00	Turkey
Italy	.00	−0.02	0.03	0.04	0.03	0.13**	−0.02	.04**	Egypt
Japan	.06**	−0.15**	0.21**	−0.02	0.04	0.14**	−0.06	.02**	USA
South Korea	.05**	−0.17**	0.16**	0.00	0.07	−0.00	−0.12**	.02**	Great Britain
Malaysia	.03**	−0.05	−0.11**	0.10**	0.10^†	−0.08	−0.01	.00	Zambia
Mexico	.02**	−0.11**	−0.00	0.05

Note. Sample size = 23,622 respondents in 33 countries.

†

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01.

Discussion

To reveal the relative importance of work in individuals’ overall life, we employed one multinational sample of 23,622 working employees from 33 nations in our examination of the moderating effects of JC and PO on the link between employees’ RCW and their LS. Our results imply that putting work as a central life interest (while neglecting other major life domains) is detrimental to individual well-being, indicating that the process and the outcomes of pursuing other goals are more satisfying than pursuing work (Cantor & Sanderson, 1999; Kasser & Ryan, 1993). These results may reflect a disappointing yet emphasized fact that even if a small group of people, such as Benjamin Franklin, feel fulfilled in their work domain, most people in this world are what William James depicted, that is, work seems to be a burden to them, and their hedonism suffers from attributing importance to work in the expense of other life domains (Ros et al., 1999).

We found that JC, as a proximal situational job factor, is implicated in the well-being of individuals with high RCW by offering them “enriched” working contents and abundant extrinsic rewards. Nevertheless, our findings only reveal a negative relationship between RCW and LS when JC is low. When JC is high, however, this RCW–LS relationship becomes marginally significant but remains negative. Our findings thus indicate that losses from individuals’ disregard for nonwork domains cannot be completely compensated by the gains achieved through work, even if this work is intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding (i.e., high JC).

We also found that PO does not have the same moderating role as JC in the RCW–LS linkage. One reason could be that the multilayers of the context vary in terms of their strength and relevance. For instance, the influences from the “distal” PO can be much weaker than those from the “proximal” JC (Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010). In other words, because an individual’s working situation is one of the present recurrent contexts for action, JC should be more potent in shaping an individual’s life experiences; by contrast, national culture originates from a society’s ecological sociohistoric legacy, and accordingly, its prescriptions should be relatively indirect (Bond, 2013; Bond & Lun, 2014).

Nevertheless, even if PO fails to have a moderating effect on the RCW–LS linkage, its effect emerges in such a way that it regulates the moderating role of JC in the RCW–LS linkage. Specifically, JC has no moderating effect when national culture has a low PO level, thereby suggesting that proximate situational influence risks losing its impact if the broad context does not support or seems to be incongruent with it. By contrast, the influence from JC could be maintained or even strengthened when the broad culture is simultaneously endorsing or congruent. In other words, as a proximal situational factor, JC can attenuate this negative effect from RCW to LS in a limited way, such that this downward trend is not completely counterbalanced until national cultures offer a “distal” context in which hard work is valued and socially legitimated (i.e., high PO).

Theoretical Implications

Our findings contribute to a series of research topics. First, prior literature on individuals’ work importance/investments has provided conflicting evidence and suggestions on how employees should approach their work. We attributed such divergence to the different research paradigms employed by scholars to examine work, with one paradigm focusing on individuals’ work importance/investment or satisfaction from work alone and with the other (i.e., work–life interface), putting work in a broad context. Focusing on the relative role of work across individuals’ various nonwork life domains and examining its relationship with LS across the globe, we examined the role of work in living a satisfying life by including individuals’ various life domains and by going beyond the literature that mainly covers Western countries (e.g., Greenhaus et al., 2003).

Second, by juxtaposing contextual variables at different levels (i.e., JC and PO) simultaneously in one research model, we examined the boundary conditions of RCW’s influence on LS and advanced the extant research on whether an employed person fits his or her job situation and national culture. To the best of our knowledge, previous research regarding person–situation fit considered situations at different levels (i.e., individual, group, unit, firm, and nation) as homogeneous. However, by distinguishing their effects at different levels and finding that culture could further decide an immediate situation’s influence, we crafted a highly sophisticated picture of how these contextual variables at different levels function synergistically in shaping individual processes. Our results show that distal cultural effects may not be found at the individual level when analyzed alone but may appear when examined as a second-order moderator. The implication is that sometimes, even if the culture’s effects fail to stand out as what the person–culture congruence model prescribes, it does not mean that culture does not play any role in the individual process. Instead, cultures may function in a highly indirect way that warrants increased scrutiny.

Finally, since House et al.’s (2004) GLOBE Project, PO as a distinctive, work-related national dimension of culture has been proposed to unpack national differences on working values, beliefs, and outcomes. Nevertheless, our understanding of PO remains scant. Thus, by linking these theoretical speculations with individuals’ life goal orientations, job situations, and subjective well-being in our study, we advance our understanding of this work-related cultural aspect.

Limitations and Future Directions

Despite the contributions and the employment of one representative sample, this study is not without limitations. First, as the focus of the study is on how individuals’ relative positioning of work influences their overall evaluation of life, we employed moderators that are solely work-related. Future studies can examine whether moderators regarding nonwork domains (e.g., individuals’ marriage/family satisfaction) or Hofstede’s sixth national dimension (e.g., indulgence vs. restraint) could make these domains highly attractive to individuals and thus downplay the effects from RCW to LS.

Second, we only examined LS as the outcome. LS as a cognitive dimension of well-being has been demonstrated to be different from happiness, the emotional dimension of well-being and physical health (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). Can we then generalize the results we identified to other dimensions of well-being? In addition, we found a negative trend between RCW and LS. Nevertheless, other hedonic outcomes related to work (e.g., work satisfaction) or personal achievement (e.g., salary increases and promotions) are likely to be positively correlated with RCW and strengthen this positive effect, along with JC and national work cultures as moderators.

Third, we can conclude on the basis of our findings that a relative emphasis on work is potentially not recommendable. However, as we did not check other important variables, we are unsure of whether our conclusion would still be valid if they were to be examined. For instance, several individual differences are likely to play crucial roles in explaining the individual differences in LS. Several people, for example, are highly achievement-oriented and intrinsically motivated; they perceive work as a calling (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997), and their personalities and intelligence enable them to excel and flourish at work (Judge, Hurst, & Simon, 2009). However, confined by the items available in the WVS-5, we could not examine these possibilities. The potential opportunities that we can envision arise from new data collections, as well as the recently published WVS Wave 6 data, in which a 10-item, Big Five personality measure has been included. Accordingly, future research could be conducted if individuals can benefit from their relatively high emphasis on work; if they are highly conscientious, agreeable, or open to experience; and whether these factors of personality are relatively more important in certain cultural systems than in others (e.g., Bond & Forgas, 1984).

Fourth, despite the large sample size in demonstrating the generalizability of our research finding, direction of causality could be a potential problem. The reason is that all data of the WVS had been collected from the same source at one time. Thus, individuals with low LS can plausibly choose to attribute high importance to work in the expense of other domains. Besides, our antecedents and outcomes also plausibly share the same predictor. For example, family conflict can lead to low general LS and at the same time to high emphasis on work. Whenever possible, future research shall also explore these possibilities as next-step research questions.

Finally, we realized that the small effect sizes can also be a threat to our research. Nevertheless, the emergence of such small effect size is reasonable. First, RCW, as our focal construct, is just a measure of psychological importance as it only reflects individuals’ values regarding their life priorities. Compared with other identified predictors of LS, RCW is not equal to what actual achievements individuals have obtained in their current jobs (i.e., job positions and compensations) nor it directly reflects their overall subjective evaluation in this important life domain (i.e., job satisfaction). Thus, RCW’s effect sizes should not be large. Furthermore, all our focal variables, including RCW, JC, and PO, reside within the working arena. Considering that individuals have numerous different life domains other than work to derive subjective well-being, the effect sizes of their interactive effects are decent. Finally, we combined WVS data and GLOBE Project scores. Cross-cultural studies very commonly use combined data to identify weak effects (e.g., Bond & Smith, 1996; Huang & Van de Vliert, 2004; Shin, Hasse, & Schotter, 2017), because those scores were collected from different sources at different time points.

Conclusion

Is it worthwhile to commit to work at the cost of other life domains? Our answer is, “It depends on what kind of job you do and what kind of culture you have.” For highly challenging and interesting jobs with tangible returns, giving additional psychological importance at work is not feasible, let alone jobs that are simple and routine. Although national culture (i.e., PO) does not function directly between individuals’ RCW and their LS, its role stands out as it heightens the influences from the immediate work context and eventually flattens the negative influence of RCW. Therefore, individual emphasis on work relative to other life domains is only recommendable when a culture has a strong emphasis on high performance and when individuals conduct complex jobs. One implication of our research is that even if a culture’s direct moderating effect fails to emerge in some instances, we cannot conclude that cultures do not work in such individual processes. Sometimes, the effects of culture are hidden, and these effects require additional in-depth research work.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are truly grateful to our AE Dr. Jenny Kurman and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,” Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (108/31511910805).

ORCID iD

Qing Lu

Notes

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