Intercultural Business Communication Assignment

Culture is a strong determinant of people's views of the very nature and meaning of

2. These characteristics are always the opposite of the West (passive/ active, static/ mobile, emotional/ rational, chaotic/ ordered)

* Identify the trait that you believe to be dominant for each of the features surveyed. Explain your reasoning.

were asked to rate people they knew on the 171 traits. The results were factor

Culture is universal and inescapable. Its expressed through different beliefs and ideas. It follows someone through their ethnicity and communities. The cultural impact is inevitable and permanent. Someone’s culture has a significant impact on the way they view the world and others. This influence is communicated through the individual's upbringing, their culture, as well as their current environment. Situations are perceived differently by those with different values. The fairly full extent of one’s cultural impact is clear.

The table provided within the attached article, (page 243) shows how different the specific traits within the study compare

The Geert Hofstede cultural dimensions seek to explain the culture of a country along five dimensions power distance, individuality, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance and long term orientation. Power distance reflects the degree to which a culture is accepting of differences in power. The higher the score, the more the country accepts inequalities among the people in the culture. The United Kingdom scores 35 and Japan 54. This means that the UK is in particular a low power distance culture, in that the people in the culture generally do not tolerate inequality in the society. For a society that has historically been class-based, this is an interesting finding, but Britain has also been home to many Enlightenment thinkers and their ideals about equality. Japan is a mildly hierarchical society with its score, and Japanese people are generally conscious of their hierarchical position. Japan tends to be fairly hierarchical in a business

6. I assume that self enhancement within collectivistic cultures are related to higher suicide rates.

In examining the relationship between those who hold power and those who have status, when one holds power but doesn’t have the status to go with it, there is often negative behavior that follows. “Across

7. What are the shortcomings of Hoftsede’s criteria for assessing differences on a global basis? Do you consider that his fifth factor adequately caters for the underlying differences between Asian and Western cultural values?

"Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are nuisance at best and often a disaster." - Dr. Geert Hofstede

Geert Hofstede developed the widely applied Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, which mainly focuses on how different countries with different cultural backgrounds handle different anthropological problems that occur in cross-cultural communication (Hofstede 1980). The first five Hofstede’s dimensions will be discussed in following paragraphs. It should be clear that there is no good and bad between two elements in each dimension since every culture has its unique features and ways to function.

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.

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.

'Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.' (Hofstede, 1991)