From Values to Adoption: On the Role of Individual Cultural Values on Fairness Toolkit Adoption in Software Development — Online Appendix

This is the online appendix containing data used during the research titled “From Values to Adoption: On the Role of Individual Cultural Values on Fairness Toolkit Adoption in Software Development”.Abstract of the PaperThe increasing integration of machine learning (ML) systems into decision-making processes has foregrounded fairness as a critical non-functional requirement in software engineering. Despite the availability of fairness toolkits designed to support bias mitigation, their adoption by software practitioners remains limited. This gap poses a challenge, as tool adoption is essential to operationalize fairness in practice, and overlooking the human-centric nature of fairness may hinder such efforts. Among the various factors that may shape adoption behavior, culture is particularly relevant: fairness is inherently linked to social and ethical values, and prior research has shown that individuals’ cultural orientations affect how fairness is perceived and enacted. Understanding cultural influences is thus critical to designing effective fairness-aware development practices. The objective of this study is to investigate whether individual cultural values influence software practitioners’ adoption of fairness toolkits. To this end, we constructed a theoretical model by integrating the UTAUT2 framework with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and empirically tested through a survey of 181 software professionals. Data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) as a robust statistical instrument. The results of the study contribute a nuanced understanding of fairness toolkit adoption by demonstrating that individual cultural values—particularly Power Distance, Collectivism, and Long-Term Orientation—play a significant role in shaping both intention and actual use. Cultural values not only acted as direct predictors but also moderated key relationships in the adoption process. For instance, developers with high collectivist orientation were more likely to translate their intention into action, suggesting that fostering group alignment and shared goals may enhance fairness-oriented behavior in teams. These insights offer actionable implications for culturally informed strategies to promote fairness tool adoption in software organizations.