Hofstede 's Model Of Cultural Dimensions

The IBM study of employees from the 70 countries was the basis for the dimensions and has been critized since there was only one company in the data set however, Hofstede’s belief was that using just one company would better reveal the national differences. According to the authors Phatak, Bhagat, and Kashalk (2009), he believed this because the IBM employees were the same in other respects like type of work, job descriptions, and education. This study has been stated to be the most comprehensive study of how values are influenced in the workplace (Itim International, 2012). Itim International, (2012) noted that Hofstede’s work established a paradigm in international economics, communication, and cooperation, from which Hofstede developed the first emphirical model of “dimensions” for national organizational culutre.

Question 1. How might the troubles with the tourism company be explained by Hofstede’s dimension of culture. Make sure to look at both Japanese and American cultures.

The most famous researcher of prevailing cultures in different countries goes by the name of Geert Hofstede. “He conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture” (). With the help of his research team, Professor Geert Hofstede created a model of national culture consisting of six dimensions. “The cultural dimensions represent independent preferences for on state of affairs

This knowledge of weakness should not be used against people of other cultures or in stereotyping individuals. In obtaining the indices, research was based on data obtained from IBM employees. According to Hofstede, “dimensions and associated country scores were developed through factor analysis of the means of nationally aggregated individual item responses which were collected as part of IBM employee surveys” (Hofstede 491). The problem, however, is that as much as this may be useful in determining the culture of a country, it does not have enough diverse subjects to form a complete perception of an individual, cultural group or organization; especially an organization different from IBM. The diversity of ethnicity, religious belief, social economic status, education and other variables that makes up an individual’s value system may not be reflected in the average IBM employee. Brewer and Verniak, in their article On the Misuse of National Culture Dimensions, believe “The correlations among the items used to measure the national culture dimensions are positive and highly significant at the aggregated national (also known as “ecological”) level, but are mostly low and insignificant and sometimes of opposite sign at the individual level” (Brewer and Venaik

Using Hofstede’s four cultural dimensions as a point of reference, what are some of the main cultural differences between the United States and France?

He supposed that culture is a common psychological program of people in same environment, which can separate a group of people from another group of people. This theory is widely used in academic researches and cross-cultural practices and has become an important theory for measurement of cultural differences among different countries. Hofstede's cultural dimension theory is divided into five dimensions, these are Power-Distance、Uncertainty Avoidance、Individualism versus Collectivism、Long-term and Short-term Orientation、Masculinity versus Femininity

The second Hofstede cultural dimension compared is “Individualism vs. Collectivism” which indicates whether members within a society define themselves as individuals or associate themselves with a particular group. In Hofstede’s comparison of Japanese and American cultures, American culture scored relatively high (91) in the individualism dimension. On the contrary, the Japanese culture scored relatively low (46) which firmly categorizes the culture as Collectivist. To clarify, Americans places self over group (Individualist), whereas the Japanese value group over self (Collectivist). As it relates to Snap Fitness’s desire to open fitness clubs in Japan, group think may lend itself to two very lucrative aspects of the business. First, a collectivist culture should stimulate Snap Fitness’s efforts to promote and sell corporate memberships which represent a significant revenue contribution in the 24/7 fitness business model. The second benefit collectivism should offer is an increase in the sales of group classes which is another notable source of club revenue.

Geert Hofstede is an influential Dutch researcher in the fields of organizational studies and more concretely organizational culture, also cultural economics and management. He is a well-known pioneer in his research of cross-cultural groups and organizations and played a major role in developing a systematic framework for assessing and differentiating national cultures and organizational cultures. His studies demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groups that influence behavior of societies and organizations.

As professor Geert Hofstede put, "Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster." Therefore, understanding different cultures in different countries is a significant issue for multinational enterprises, especially for the inevitable trend of globalization. As our project aims at analyzing the international expansion of German, Japanese, and Irish enterprises, I would like to depict the culture background of these three countries through the method of Hofstede Culture Dimensions.

Culture influences our expectations of what is appropriate or inappropriate and also learned and reflects the values of a society. It frames our experiences and provides us with patterns of behavior, thinking, feeling, and interacting. In summary, culture affects every prospect of daily life - how we think and feel, how we learn and teach, or what we consider to be beautiful or cross-grained. However, most people are unaware of their own culture until they experience another. In fact, we don 't regularly suppose about our culture until somebody violates a culturally-supported expectation or we find ourselves in a situation where we have the feeling that we violated somebody else 's cultural expectations, but are inconsonant how.

I have been selected as the project leader for Gummere International and directed to assemble a multicultural team together to develop a custom ERP system to be used by all of our subsidiaries. I have been given a one month, unrealistic, deadline to present our solution to the board of directors. The division of the firm responsible for the design and development of the system is based in India; and due to a language barrier, the project has gotten off to a rocky start. Through Web 2.0 technology, I was able to mitigate the barriers and complete the task.

When a business decides to venture internationally into different countries with its products, services, and operations, it is very important that the company gains an understanding of how the culture of the different societies affects the values found in those societies. Geert Hofstede conducted one of the most famous and most used studies on how culture relates to values. Hofstede study enabled him to compare dimensions of culture across 40 countries. He originally isolated four dimensions of what he claimed summarized different cultures — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity (Hill, 2013, p.110). To cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm Hofstede has since added two more dimensions — Confucianism or long-term orientation and indulgence versus self-restraint (Hofstede, n.d.). Because of the way Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are given an index score from 0-100, it is easy for a company to get a general comparison between the cultures they are expanding into and the culture they are already in.

anthropology research in the late 1970s and early 1980s – the scores are general comparisons of

Growth of research addressing the relationship between culture and consumption is exponential. Thus, culture’s influence on consumption and marketing had drawn increasing attention in recent years. Hofstede’s framework is the most widely used national cultural framework in psychology, sociology, marketing and management studies. His dimensions were all constructed in such a way that they addressed basic problems that all societies have to deal with. Thus, these dimensions of national culture were constructed at the national level namely:

The studies into culture have been on-going and the importance of cultural significance in societies has increased in recent years due to the changing dimensions of the world we live in. Globalization itself has had a very profound effect on cross-cultural interactions through progression in the fields of communication and technology that allow the formation of virtual work teams, the elimination of borders in trade, increased labour mobility and migration between countries. While theorists over the years have tried to define culture, it is important to note that cultural experts themselves have stressed the difficulty of defining the concept without touching into different ideas and theories that contradict each other (Browaeys and Price, 2008). Hofstede (2001) defines culture as 'the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another '. In his book International Management (2003), Tayeb adds to the literature defining culture as ‘historically evolved values, attitudes and meanings that are learned and shared by the members of community and which influence their material and non-material way of life’. Some of the most commonly identified elements of culture are values, attitudes, rituals and shared meanings that are developed by individuals over the course of their lives through education, regional and national influences (Hofsede et al, 1991; Schwartz, 1992; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1997). Having