View article

A century beyond the founding of industrial and organizational psychology (Muchinsky, 2000) the field has much to celebrate. There has been major theoretical progress in areas as diverse as selection, training, and performance appraisal, as well as organizational attitudes, motivation, stress, leadership, and team dynamics. Likewise, as this volume attests, the field has grown leaps and bounds in its methodological diversity, offering much-needed complexity for the phenomena studied in the field. In this chapter, we take this diversity further by focusing on an often-neglected topic in IO psychology, namely methodological issues in conducting cross-cultural organizational research. As noted below, for both theoretical and practical reasons, there is an urgent need for the field to become global. Becoming global in emphasis, however, requires added methodological complexity and new judgment in conducting high-quality research, which is the central focus of this chapter.

In what follows, we first discuss the necessity of conducting cross-cultural research in IO, and the numerous benefits that research on culture can bring to the field. Next, we focus on how culture infiltrates the actual research process itself. We describe the specific cultural concerns that arise during this process, as well as potential ways to take such issues into account in the design and implementation of cross-cultural research. We conclude with a discussion of the future of cross-cultural research methods, and the promise they may offer the field.