Geert Hofstede’s research in this area has been largely accepted as the standard for understanding culture within nations for study in many different disciplines including sociology and management research, among others. His studies because of their vastness in scale, gathering data from more than ”60,000 respondents in seventy different countries,” makes his research extremely reliable and foundational to research in this area (Hofstede, 1984, 1991, 2001).”
Based on his research, Hofstede prescribed five dimensions for understanding international differences and similarities of culture, taking into account many macro and micro-level factors affecting culture, like ”demographic, goegraphic, economic and political aspects of society (Kale and Barnes, 1992).” The five dimentstions described by Hofstede are: Individual-collectivism, Uncertainty avoidance, Power distance, Feminitiy-masculinity, and Long-term orientation.
• Individualism-collectivism is used to describe relationships found within each culture that either only concern themselves with their own individual concerns versus cultures that produce a collective culture where loyalty resides within a particular group within the culture.
• Uncertainty avoidance describes cultural behavior which depends on a set of rules to determine or guide cultural behavior. Within this group, individuals within this culture feel ”threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity and try to avoid these situations (Hofstede, 1991: 113).”
• Power distance defines the influence of power dynamics within a culture or family that shows the ”consequences of power inequality and authority relations in a society (Soares, Farhangmehr, & Shoham, 2007).”
• Masculinity-feminity defines countries as either femin...
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...els have been criticized by many, including Hofstede. Hofstede questioned the applicability of Trompenaa’rs work considering its focus on managerial behavior based on organizational relationship models in the U.S., saying, ”A serious shortcoming of Tromenaar’s data bank which no professional analysis can correct is its evident lack of content validity,” while other critics of Trompenaar’s research say his research is faulty due to ”cultural biases and base assumptions (Minko, 2011) (St. Claire-Ostwald, 2007) (Agents2Change, 2012).” Even with these shortcomings, businesses continue to use these models for insight into cultural differences and how they affect management culture and behavior.
There are several websites that incorporate Trompenaars’ seven dimensions model for asses-sing culture, including HR culture, business culture, and business coaching tools.
A culture’s tendency to be individualistic or collectivistic can be found at the root of
Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. Second Edition, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2001
Uncertainty in organizations is a key element to be dealt with in the areas of technology, rules and rituals (Hofstede, 1980). The notion of uncertainty is frequently connected to the perception of environment as the ‘environment is taken to include everything not under direct control of the organization as a source of uncertainty for which the organization tries to compensate’ (Hofstede, 1980: 155). The organization deals with uncertainty in the way in which uncertainties are observed inside the business. According to Torrington, uncertainty avoidance is the degree to which the future is always unknown (1994). Some cultures socialize their participants to accept this idea and take risks. Whereas members of other cultures have been socialized to be made worried or threatened by this and therefore, search for reparation through the ‘security of law, religion or technology’. (Torrington, 1994:
Hofstede measured and compared country scores on initially four, later five cultural dimensions. According to these dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, long-term vs. short-term orientation, countries can hierarchically be ordered on compared (Geert-hofstede.com, 2014).
Cultural theory is used to observe culture in different lands and observe how they differ; it also looks at how they compare to our own culture. It explores how these...
(1994). Beyond Individualism/Collectivism: New Cultural Dimensions of Values. In U.Kim, H.C. Triandis, C. Kagitcibasi, S. Choi & G. Yoon (Eds.). Individualism and Collectivism: Theory, Method, and Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 112-115.
Cultures are infinitely complex. Culture, as Spradley (1979) defines it, is "the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experiences and generate social behavior" (p. 5). Spradley's emphasizes that culture involves the use of knowledge. While some aspects of culture can be neatly arranged into categories and quantified with numbers and statistics, much of culture is encoded in schema, or ways of thinking (Levinson & Ember, 1996, p. 418). In order to accurately understand a culture, one must apply the correct schema and make inferences which parallel those made my natives. Spradley suggests that culture is not merely a cognitive map of beliefs and behaviors that can be objectively charted; rather, it is a set of map-making skills through which cultural behaviors, customs, language, and artifacts must be plotted (p. 7). This definition of culture offers insight into ...
Each and every culture is defined by their people. The people make up the part of the whole and cultures function differently for a variety of reasons (Mooji, 2014, p. 81). Internal and external factors on both the macro and micro level play important roles within a society. Countries can be categorized into one of two types of cultures: collectivist or individualistic. These cultures are opposite, each culture possesses descriptive characteristics which include “religion, family structure, … and social class structure” among a number of other characteristics to which the people within the “given societies view as very important, if not critical” (Mooji, 2014, p. 82). Simply stated, Mooji (p. 90) defines people in collectivist cultures as
Triandis, H., & Wasti, S. (2008). Culture. In D. Stone, & E. Stone-Romeo, The influence of culture on human resource management processes and practices (pp. 1-24). Psychology Press
In the article, Cultural constraints in management theories, Geert Hofstede examines business management around the globe from a cultural perspective. He explains how he believes there are no universal practices when it comes to management and offers examples from the US, Germany, France, Japan, Holland, China and Russia. He demonstrates how business management theories and practices are very much subject to cultural norms and values and by understanding these differences, it can give managers an advantage in global business practices.
Professor Geert Hofstede led an extensive comprehensive study of values in the workforce and how they are influenced by culture. His research spanned over 70 countries during 1937 and 1973, and many different types of workers in several levels of the workforce Hofstede, G. (2001). Based on his research, he developed a model of six dimensions of national culture. The six dimensions are labeled as: Power distance index, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance index, long term orientation versus short term normative orientation and indulgence versus restraint. Below I will compare the dimensions of cultures scores for various countries. Finally, I will compare two countries using the Hofstede’s six dimensions of culture and discus how cultural differences impact work relationships.
Basically, Hofstede’s cultural dimension is divided into five dimensions along which national culture could be described: power distance (PDI), individualism-collectivism (IDV), masculinity-femininity (MAS), uncertainty avoidance (UAI) and long-term orientation versus short-term normative orientation (LTO).
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences : Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions & Organizations across Nations (2nd ed.). USA, Sage.
There are varies distinguish cultures existing in this beautiful world and different people categorized them in varies ways. A Dutch social psychologist Geert Hfstede developed his own dimensions to categorize cultures which is the most notable work in his life. Hofstede’s dimensions are power distance, which is the degree of inequality acceptance, high power distance refers to high acceptance of inequality; uncertainty avoidance, which refers to adaptability of change. High uncertainty avoidance cultures consider uncertainty or change is jeopardy; individualism - collectivism, individualism cultures emphasize more on individual level goals and collectivism culture emphasize on group goals and sometimes sacrifice individual if necessary; masculinity
The Hofstede model of national culture differences, based on research carried out in the early seventies, is the first major study to receive worldwide attention. This influential model of cultural traits identifies five dimensions of culture that help to explain how and why people from various cultures behave as they do. According to Hofstede (1997) culture is Ù[ collective programming of the mind? This referring to a set of assumptions, beliefs, values and practices that a group of people has condoned as a result of the history of their engagements with one another and their environment over time. In this study, culture refers to a set of core values and behavioural patterns people have due to socialisation to a certain culture. The author̼ theoretical framework will be applied to compare differing management practices in China and the West. The five measurements of culture identified by the author are: