Cultural Attribution in Cross-cultural Research: A Decomposition Approach By: Professor CUI Geng

1. Department of Marketing and International Business, Lingnan University Marketing Research Seminar 2 May 2008 (Friday) 9:30am - 12:00noon Council Chamber, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Language: Putonghua The Effects of Customers’ Interactional Injustice on Employees’ Performance: A Multilevel ModelBy:Dr. ZHANG Xiu JuanAssociate Professor Department of Marketing, School of Business Sun Yat-sen UniversityBased on Affective Event Theory and Denotic Fairness theory, the authors proposed a multi-level model to investigate the impacts of injustice climate caused by customer’s interactional injustice on employees' emotion and performance. The result of structural equation modeling and Hierarchical Linear Modeling analysis indicates that customers’ interactional injustice results in the increases of employees’ negative emotion, and indirectly decreases employees’ positive emotion. Employees’ positive emotion is positively related with their performance, with a moderating effect of injustice climate level. The strength of the injustice climate has significant positive impact on the team level performance. Cultural Attribution in Cross-cultural Research:A Decomposition Approach By:Professor CUI Geng Professor Department of Marketing and International Business Lingnan University Cross-cultural studies often attribute cross-national variations in consumer attitudes and behaviors to differences in cultural values. However, comparing national differences without direct measures of the effects of cultural values and the necessary covariates is untenable and may produce misleading results. We propose a decomposition approach to analyze cross-cultural studies and use survey data from two countries on consumer attitudes toward marketing to demonstrate its advantages. The results show that Chinese consumers have more positive attitudes toward marketing than their Canadian counterparts and the two countries differ across all the predictor variables. The tests of equality indicate that the two country equations and some coefficients significantly differ between the two samples. Group-level analyses using the decomposition approach suggest that idealism has significant endowment and treatment effects on the country gap, while consumerism, individualism and relativism do not. Lastly, we explore the advantages and implications of this approach to inferential analysis of national differences in cross-cultural consumer research and international business studies. How Cloudy a Crystal Ball:A Psychometric Assessment of Concept TestingBy:Dr. PENG LingAssistant Professor Department of Marketing and International Business Lingnan UniversityAlthough traditional and conjoint forms of concept testing play an important role in the new product development process, they largely ignore data quality issues, as evidenced by the traditional reliance on the percentage of Top-2-Box scores heuristic. The purpose of this research is to reconsider the design of concept testing from a measurement theory (Generalizability Theory) perspective and suggest some ways to improve the psychometric quality of concept testing. The article identifies four types of sources (concept related factors, response task factors, situational factors and respondent factors) that can contribute to the observed variation in concept testing, and develop six research propositions that summarize what is known or assumed about their contribution to observed score variance. Four secondary datasets from different concept testing contexts are then used to test the propositions. The results provide new insights into the design of concept tests and the psychometric quality of the concept testing data. All are welcome.For reservation, please send your name and contact number to mib@Ln.edu.hk For enquiries, please contact Ms Linda Jo at 2616 8239.