EXAMINING WORK ETHIC ACROSS LATAM POPULATIONS: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ECUADORIAN AND CHILEAN WORKERS

Abstract

As the volume of trade within South America increases, understanding the cultural differences between countries will become increasingly important for managers to develop good human resource practices. An important issue that has been little studied to date is the variation in beliefs and work ethic values across borders. The objectives of this study were: to analyze the differences in the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) values between Ecuador and Chile; and evidence the dimensionality and factorial invariance of a short version of the most used scale to measure the work ethics construct "Multidimensional Profile of Work Ethics" in two South American populations. The original 65-item scale was applied to 530 people (N Ecuadorians = 402; N Chileans =128). Reliability was good and we conclude that there is configural invariance, metric invariance, and partial scalar invariance for the MWEP values. In addition, it was observed that it is possible to reduce the original scale to a scale with only 28 items, keeping the seven dimensions of the original scale. Regarding the differences in PWE, it was found that Ecuadorians and Chileans workers differ in self-reliance, leisure, delayed gratification and wasted time