Research Of The Relationship Between Shame-proneness And Work Effort

Shame is considered as a non-adaptive emotional experience which leads to adverse consequences in the western society. Actually, shame plays the role of maintaining the stability and harmony of society in China. The well-known saying of "Be brave after feeling shame" explains the shame's function of encouraging people to make effort to correct actions. If so, whether shame has different effects on work effort in different cultures? This paper attempted to answer this question through studying the relationship of individualistic/collectivistic orientation, shame-proneness and work effort.The main research methods of this study included literature study, questionnaire study and statistical analysis. First of all, literature study reviewed the concepts, dimensions, measurements and related study content of three main variables, and then discussed the achievement and defects of the existing research. On the basis of the reviews of references, the research hypothesis and theoretical model of this paper were put forward. Secondly, after the appropriate scales of the related variables were selected and revised, questionnaire study collected the corresponding data from the enterprise staffs and altogether recycled 297 effective questionnaires. In the end, some data analysis methods, such as variance analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis, were used to acquire the statistical results to test the hypothesis. And the final research conclusions were drawn after discussing the results of hypothesis test.The main conclusions of the study were as follows:Firstly, shame-proneness negatively correlated with work effort indeed. Shame-proneness could negatively predict the work effort, the higher the shame proneness of employees, the lower the level of work effort. Secondly, individualistic orientation and collectivistic orientation had a different effect on the relationship between shame-proneness and work effort. Individualistic orientation had no significant effect on the relationship, and shame-proneness still negatively predicted the work effort. Collectivistic orientation could weaken the influence of shame-proneness on work effort, and the higher the employees'collectivistic orientation, the weaker the negative effect of shame-proneness on work effort. Thirdly, the effect of horizontal and vertical division system of cultural orientation also needed to be taken into consideration. They had a different influence on the relationship of shame-proneness and work effort. Horizontal individualistic orientation had no significant effect on the relationship, while vertical individualistic orientation weakened the negative influence of shame-proneness on work effort. Fourthly, the division of four dimensions of individualistic/collectivistic orientation was reasonable. Fit indices of three models and the different influence of horizontal and vertical division system both showed that the division of four dimensions of individualistic/collectivistic orientation was better than single-dimensional and two-dimensional divisions.The research conclusion partly confirmed initial vision of this study. Shame had different effects on work effort in the western and Chinese cultures. Although the western scholars agreed that shame would lead to adverse consequences, shame had a different role in Chinese culture. And there were some reasons why shame was valued in Chinese culture. Collectivistic culture weakened the negative influence of shame and highlighted its moral function. Under such a circumstance, Shame-proneness didn't negatively predict the work effort any more. And its negative effect on work effort was reduced to almost nothing when collectivistic orientation was high enoughAccording to research conclusions, this paper put forward some suggestions about how to weaken the level of shame-proneness, strengthen the level of collectivistic orientation and screen job candidates to improve the work effort of employees. At last, the limitations and deficiencies of this research were summarized, and the prospects of research directions were forecasted.