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The influence of religion as an important element of national contexts has been largely neglected in international management research, even though all major religions promote particular values that believers express at work. In this article, we apply the country institutional profile (Kostova, 1999) to specify cognitive, normative, and regulative elements of national religious contexts and relate them to individuals' work obligation norms. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) on data from 62,128 individuals in 45 countries, we find support for our hypotheses regarding positive relationships with one cognitive component (importance of God) and one normative component (behavioral aspect of religion). Our hypothesis for the negative relationship between the regulative component (state religion) and work obligation is also supported. We also propose that religious pluralism will weaken the relationships between the cognitive and normative aspects of religion and work obligations. Results provide varying support for the interactive effects of religious pluralism. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our results and argue for the analytical importance of religion in understanding workplace behaviors.
Parboteeah et al. (2009) studied this question.