11902: Making Sense of Jingle-Jangle Fallacies in International Management,Cross-Cultural Research with AI

Management researchers have been interested in culture for over 100 years (Gelfand & Erez, 2024). However, the complexity of culture as a multidimensional construct brings many challenges (Fischer & Ferreira, 2024). One major challenge in cross-cultural management research is the ambiguity in defining and measuring culture and its impact on human behaviors. Different studies use different scales to assess collectivism versus individualism. Numerous other scales assess power distance, while others assess uncertainty avoidance. This proliferation of measures poses questions about the cumulative knowledge of the field. The objective of this PDW is to uncover the two potential fallacies that impacted the cross-cultural research in management and OB: (a) The Jingle Fallacy occurs when using different measures of the same construct, for example, Power Distance, erroneously attributing the same theoretical explanation to different phenomena. (b) The Jangle Fallacy occurs when two identical phenomena are labeled differently. We plan to review research demonstrating the different measures that assessed the same cultural value and their impact on human behavior. We then present an AI-driven approach for detecting jingle-jangle problems by analyzing semantic similarities across cultural constructs. This approach reveals nuanced themes within major cultural dimensions and the extent to which different measures of the same cultural construct led to different conclusions about the culture’s effect on human behavior. Finally, we will discuss the implications for measurement and theory development in International Management, cross-cultural OB research, and future directions.

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