Employees’ information-seeking behaviors in multicultural contexts : development of an advanced model including information overload, team-level factors, and cultural backgrounds

The primary goal of the current study is to develop a more advanced model of information-seeking behaviors. For achieving this goal, it paid attention to two social phenomena characterizing contemporary society: informationalization and globalization. First, focusing on these two influential phenomena, this study investigated how individual-level factors—information overload, information ambiguity, and goal orientations—affected information-seeking behaviors among employees in a multinational corporation. Next, in addition to these individual predictors of information-seeking behaviors, this study explored the effects of two team-level factors—team task interdependence and team tenure—on the relationships between the main predictors and information-seeking behaviors. Last, paying more attention to the multicultural context, this study investigated how these employees in a multinational corporation seek task and feedback information from two culturally different sources: American direct advisors and Korean expatriates. In order to more thoroughly investigate the roles of the cultural backgrounds of information sources, this study explored how American employees perceived the cultural backgrounds of the two culturally different sources and how such perceptions influenced those employees’ information-seeking behaviors.