The present study aimed to examine how people's collectivist tendencies may be related to their distributive judgments. A conceptual model was proposed. People with high collectivist tendencies might be more inclined to maintain good interpersonal relationships (vs. to increase productivity) than people with low collectivist tendencies in distributing rewards. Because of this, high collectivist subjects may consider and pay attention to interpersonal relations related information, such as the status difference (seniority) among the reward receivers and their "face" difference. Also high collectivists' distributive judgments might be affected by cognitive busyness because they might need cognitive capacity to infer face information from a worker's seniority. To test my conceptual model,...[ Read more ]

The present study aimed to examine how people's collectivist tendencies may be related to their distributive judgments. A conceptual model was proposed. People with high collectivist tendencies might be more inclined to maintain good interpersonal relationships (vs. to increase productivity) than people with low collectivist tendencies in distributing rewards. Because of this, high collectivist subjects may consider and pay attention to interpersonal relations related information, such as the status difference (seniority) among the reward receivers and their "face" difference. Also high collectivists' distributive judgments might be affected by cognitive busyness because they might need cognitive capacity to infer face information from a worker's seniority. To test my conceptual model, two studies were conducted. Study 1 examined how people's distributive judgments might be affected by the relationship of the workers: (1) how cohesive they were as a group and (2) how long each worker had been serving in the work group (i.e., seniority). Also, subjects' collectivist tendencies were also measured. Results showed that high collectivists tended to maximize the rewards distributed to the senior worker. But this effect was not found among low collectivists. They seemed to distribute rewards based on the workers' contributions. To further explore the psychological processes that give rise to such distributive judgments, in Study 2, subjects were asked to distribute a bonus between two workers with high vs. low seniority and high vs. low contribution. In half of the conditions, the subjects made the judgments when they were cognitively busy, and in other conditions, when they were cognitively non-busy. Findings showed that, in distributing rewards, high collectivist subjects reported that they had considered the low contributor's face more when they were cognitively non-busy, than when they were cognitively busy. As such, it seemed that it was a relatively controlled process for high collectivists to consider face in distributing rewards. But there was no cognitive busyness effect among the low collectivist subjects. Also, regardless of their levels of cognitive busyness, high collectivist subjects judged that it would be more likely for the senior worker than the junior worker to lose face if he contributed less and was allocated less than 50% of the bonus. This was not found among low collectivists. Implications of these findings were discussed.