Invariant effect of individual cultural orientations: an application of CVSCALE

Purpose Culture is recognized as a pivotal variable in country of origin (COO) research. The purpose of this paper is to assess culture from an individual perspective and to examine the extent to which individual cultural orientations have similar associations with 33 manager- and consumer-related variables between two culturally opposite countries: the USA and South Korea. Design/methodology/approach An online survey is used. The sample size is 540 for the US sample and 572 for the Korean sample. The correlational similarity between the cultural orientations and other variables is analyzed in three ways and confirmed invariant in the majority cases of each analysis. Findings Individual cultural orientations are measured by Cultural Value Scale (Yoo et al. , 2011), a 26-item five-dimensional scale measuring Hofstede’s typology of culture at the individual level. The three-faceted similarity test of each of the 165 pairs of correlations between the USA and Korea samples (i.e. 33 variables × 5 dimensions of individual cultural orientations) shows that the majority of the correlations are significantly similar between the two countries. Originality/value This is a first study in examining the invariance of the relationships of all five dimensions of Hofstede’s culture at the individual level to a variety of variables. As the invariance is found to be a norm, the role of culture in the COO phenomena can be studied at the individual level in a country and be expanded to other countries.