Abstract

Prosocial behavior plays a crucial role in enhancing the meaningfulness of human lives by promoting the virtues of altruism, benevolence, and kindness to others. To deepen our understanding of supervisors’ prosocial behavior, the authors examined the influence of supervisors’ personality traits on their prosocial behavior. The country-level moderating effects of cultural values on individual-level relationships were also investigated. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to analyze World Values Survey (WVS) data of 5,213 supervisors from twelve countries. Findings showed that supervisors’ agreeableness and conscientiousness negatively impacted their prosocial behavior. Moreover, the individual-level associations were moderated by cultural dimensions, including future orientation, humane orientation, performance orientation, and in-group collectivism. The counterintuitive results highlight the need to integrate alternative perspectives and approaches to fully understand the interaction between personality and culture, and their impact on prosocial behavior. Contributions, practical implications, and directions for further research were then discussed.