1419 Congruence and Functions of Personal and Cultural Values: Do My Values Reflect My Culture’s Values? Ronald Fischer Victoria University Wellington Kitayama, 1991; Singelis, 1994), and subjective well-being (E. Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995), to name just a few. An alternative to these self-reports is to change the referent. It is possible to ask individuals to report on the average characteristics within their group, for example, the behavior of most people within their culture, what most people like or value or think (Glick, 1985; James, Joyce, & Slocum, 1988). By doing so, individuals are reporting on descriptive norms (Cialdini & Trost, 1998) within a specific population (Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004). Within the organizational literature, these reports are used to measure properties of the larger system or unit such as the work group or the larger organization (Fischer, in press; Glick, 1985; James et al., 1988; see also Peterson & Fischer, 2004). However, an interesting question that has not been addressed is (a) to what extent self- and culture- referenced measurements correlate at a cultural level and (b) how self- and group-referenced constructs Author’s Note: I would like to thank Shalom Schwartz for valuable com- ments on a previous draft and stimulating discussions. I am grateful for valuable comments and discussions with Charles Harb, Robert McCrae, Peter B. Smith, Johnny Fontaine, Seger Breugelmans, Michael Bond, David Matsumoto, and Harry Triandis. I would like to thank Eveline Maria Leal Assmar, Bor-Shiuan Cheng, Maria Cristina Ferreira, Co C. Huynh, Ding-Yu Jiang, Alicia Omar, Paul Redford, Weiling Hsu, Neelam Kumar, Joscha Kärtner, Jan Hofer, and Luis Rodríguez for their help and great efforts in collecting data for the Organization, Culture and Behavior (OCaB) project. I used part of the data for the first study. The research was partly funded by grants from the University Research Fund at Victoria University Wellington and the School of Psychology. During the writing process, I was supported by a Research and Study Leave Grant from Victoria University Wellington while being hosted by the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Please address correspon- dence to Ronald Fischer, Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research, School of Psychology, Victoria University Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand; e-mail: ronald.fischer@vuw.ac.nz. PSPB, Vol. 32 No. 11, November 2006 1419-1431 DOI: 10.1177/0146167206291425 © 2006 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc. Two studies are described examining the correlation between self- and culture-referenced values at a culture level (Study 1) and correlation between self- and culture-referenced values and self-reported behavior at an individual level (Study 2). It is found that values related to individual-group relationships (embeddedness) and expression and experience of affective feel- ings and emotions (affective autonomy) are significantly corre- lated at a culture level. In Study 2, culture-referenced values are shown to correlate with behaviors attached to social norms, whereas self-rated values are found to correlate with behaviors that are not norm-governed. Implications for measurement of cultural values and cultural and cross-cultural research designs are discussed. Keywords: cross-cultural comparison; values; culture; referent effects; individualism-collectivism; level of analysis The measurement of cultural characteristics has been one of the central interests to psychologists for a consid- erable time. Starting with Hofstede’s (1980) seminal work, researchers have devoted much energy uncovering cultural variations in behavior. This is commonly done by asking individuals about the importance of particular concepts of interest (such as values, identities, personal- ity, beliefs, etc.) in their personal lives, which are then compared across cultural samples. Mean scores based on self-ratings are routinely compared across cultural boundaries and it is implicitly assumed that the central tendency of those self-ratings reflects cultural character- istics (Hofstede, 2001; Kim, Triandis, Kag  itçibasi, Choi, & Yoon, 1994; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeir, 2002; Schwartz, 1994; Smith & Schwartz, 1997). Self-reports have emerged as the dominant method for cross-cultural comparisons, as exemplified by large-scale studies on social axioms (Leung & Bond, 2004; Leung et al., 2002), personality (McCrae, 2002), individualism-collectivism (see Oyserman et al., 2002), self-construals (Markus &