Mapping Bank Employee Perceptions of Organizational Stimuli in Two Countries

Abstract

This study demonstrates a way of understanding how employees in different countries perceive, attach meaning to, interpret, and organize the stimuli surrounding them, by mapping their perceptions through the statistical technique of higher order factor analysis.

Responses to questionnaire items from a sample of267 white-collar workers in 12 banks in the Midwestern United States and 307 employeesfrom 9 banks in the urban parts of India werefirstfactor analyzed. The 19 factors that emerged in each of the two countries through this initial factor analysis, together with six other single-item variables, were then submitted to a higher order offactor analysis, individually for the two samples. Five nets or constellations of variables were captured in each of the two countries. The similarities and differences in the variables in the nets, and the implications of these for managers and researchers, are discussed here.