National Culture and Leisure Across the Workweek: A Mean Level and Trajectory Approach

Abstract

Based on a variety of literature from organizational studies, anthropology, and sociology, our research challenges the previous research assumption of entrainment trajectory as linear. The reason for such an assumption may be because previous research only conducted the convenient sampling method and collected data from one or several companies, which limits the power to detect real entrainment patterns. Utilizing Google Trends data on daily leisure engagement for twenty countries that cover over a half of world population, we unveil, at the population level, a nonlinear temporal trajectory of leisure over the workweek that first decreases from Monday to midweek, then stabilizes during the midweek, and later increases from midweek to Friday. Moreover, our findings also indicate that Hofstede’s cultural work values exert significant influences on the entrainment trajectory of leisure across the workweek, such that population level of engagement in leisure across the workweek is lower for societies of higher power distance, higher individualism, higher masculinity, lower uncertainty avoidance, higher long-term orientation, or lower indulgence cultural work values. Finally, our findings also suggest that the societies that are culturally higher in power distance, higher in individualism, lower in masculinity, higher in uncertainty avoidance, higher in long-term orientation, or higher in indulgence follow a much more clear workweek rhythm of leisure and display a trajectory with sharper changes from Monday to Friday. Implications for entrainment research and cross-culture studies were further discussed.