Culture, value commitments, and supervisors’ ethics: Exploring a multilevel mediation model

Significant research provides evidence of social and individual factors that influence ethics. However, consideration of the cultural assimilation process that simultaneously emphasizes the roles of national-level and individual-level values is scarce. Building on the arguments of Merton's anomie theory (1938, 1968), this study considered a multilevel mediation model to investigate the direct effects of cultural values on supervisors' ethics as well as the indirect effects through value commitments. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to perform a centered within context with the reintroduction of the subtracted means at Level-2 (CWC(M)) mediation analysis on the data of 9813 supervisors across 30 countries. The study's findings contribute to Merton's anomie theory by deliberating on the importance of the assimilation of society's cultural values as reflected by individual value commitments in shaping supervisors' ethicality. Considering that some results opposed the propositions of Merton's anomie theory, this paper offered arguments that complement them.