The Influence of Cultural Values on Social Evaluations

Abstract Organisations are increasingly formed, governed, led, and evaluated by multicultural individuals. These individuals internalise the values, assumptions, and norms of more than one ‘culture’. Internalised values and their structures serve as fundamental building blocks of cultural norms, transcend situations based on their strength, guide the evaluation of other actors’ behaviours, and ultimately serve collective interests through their alignment with other social actors. Yet, our understanding of the multiple sources of cultural values, and how their multiplicity and interplay configure, to inform social evaluations and filter the interpretation of behaviours remains fragmented. This chapter examines the role of cultural values in social evaluations. However, to address the challenge presented by the gap between macro- (global) and micro- (local) level determinants of cultural values, it presents a multilevel, bottom-up conceptualisation of value structures that depict the global and localised sources of values guiding multicultural actors’ evaluations. By disentangling the various, yet simultaneously activated sources of values, it examines how their interplay filters stakeholders’ active social evaluations. Consequently, it shows how some sources of cultural values can overcome, align with, or contradict other sources in this process. This contributes to our understanding of how the multiplicity and interplay of cultural values can give rise to positive or negative evaluations. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research examining the role of cultural values on social evaluations.