Leadership And Hofstede 's Five Dimensions

In essence this dimension deals with the relationship between the individual and the collectives in a given society. It is reflected in the way in which people live together. For example, nuclear families, extended families, tribes and other larger communities. It directly effects peoples values and behaviours. In some cultures individualism is sometime to be sought after but in others it is seen as alienation.

Managers in today’s world are important assets to the multicultural organisations. Leadership styles of managers are highly important in terms of managing the team of followers, which has a correlation to the productivity and results that the team would achieve in the future. By having good management, it contributes to the success of the organisation. Hence, it is vital to identify the different leadership styles especially in different cultures to suit the working environment and culture of the organization. In the present multicultural global business industry, cultural differences can come in the way of the success of project completion (Anbari, Khilkhanova, Romanova, & Umpleby , 2009) . It has been claimed that rigid leadership does not promote motivation and creativity, therefore, managers should lead by flexible leadership and be culturally sensitive, adapting to different cultures, for the team to be able to move forward and reach their goals (Anabri et al. 2009). The way a manager’s leadership takes place also affect’s the experience of the employees at work and the relationship between the manager and the employee. Jariya (2012, p66) states that ‘different cultures differ in the values they endorse, people from these cultures often interpret the same managerial practices

Eric Mack’s essay “In Defense of Individualism” provides a basic outlook of individualistic personalities and interactions that are prevalent throughout society. Mack gives definitions of different theories in individualism, breaking the encompassing thought

Looking at the chart the first dimension of culture plotted is individualism-collectivism. This dimension addresses how people define themselves and their relationships with others. Cultures that fall on the individualism side of the continuum share four characteristics. First, such cultures consider the individual to be the most important entity in any social setting. Second, individualistic cultures stress independence rather than dependence. Third, individualistic cultures reward individual achievement. The last characteristic is; individualistic cultures value each individual’s uniqueness.

Moreover, Individualism is the cultural dimension that measures to what extent people to look after themselves and their immediate family members only. America’s individualism score of 91 is the highest in the world and higher than France’s score of 71. This kind of cultural reflect in American executives at Disney based on Walt Disney’s highly individualized, squeaky clean American family values to imposed a strict dress code at Euro Disneyland, such as required extremely short hair and banned beards and moustaches (Corliss, R., 1992).

1) An individualist is considered to be someone with personality and character, someone who is not easily intimidated by social pressure or customs, someone with a personal opinion and a singular view of the world. Because modern society finds it important that people think independently, decide autonomously and take personal initiatives, the concept of individualism has acquired a positive connotation. However, individualism is also linked with the tendency to withdraw from social life and turn in towards oneself.

Dr. Hofstede performed a comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. In the 1970’s, as a Dutch researcher Dr. Geert Hofstede, collected and analyzed data from 116,000 surveys taken from IBM employees in forty different countries around the world. From those results, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions of differentiate cultures. These include: Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Masculinity-Femininity (MAS), Individualism-Collectivism (IND), Power and Distance (PD). After a further study of the Asian culture by researcher Michael Bond in 1991, Hofstede added a fifth dimension in his theory, Long- and Short-term time orientation (LTO), also referred to as the Confucian Dynamism. His research has framed how cultural differences can be used in professional business transactions. Geert Hofstede 's dimensions analysis can assist the business person in better understanding the intercultural differences within regions and between countries.

Power/Distance (PD), “refers to the degree of inequality that exists- and is accepted- among people with and without power. A high PD score indicates that society accepts an unequal distribution of power, and that people understand “their place” in the system. Low PD means that power is shared and well dispersed.” (www.mindtools.com) As an example from the article, Myers goes on to say, “there were basically four levels: VP, director, manager, and worker bee. You only talked to people at your level.” SK Telecom boasted that

This paper will be about the relation between the cultural dimension ‘power distance’ and three management principles we chose and will also be about the applicability of these management principles. This is quite interesting because even though we know that the cultural dimensions, by Geert Hofstede, and the management principles, by Fayol, have something to do with each other, the more the cultural dimensions differ, the more the ranking of the management principles will differ in the compared countries. We will now try to find out if some of these principles are more linked to a certain cultural dimension, in our case Power Distance, than others and we will find out whether these

Individualistic cultures tend to favor feeling free and less responsible for the members around them. In class, we discussed our own experiences of living in an individualistic culture. For example, if a parent were to become ill and more dependent, it is not uncommon for the children to send the parent to a nursing home. The ill parent would feel embarrassed if their child had to help them use a restroom or bathe themselves.Whereas, in a collectivism

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.

Expanding on that, a person is immeresed in his/her culture since birth, and has no choice but to adopt the values necessary to survive. An individualistic community encourages a person to make his/her own choices; moreover, one would be less concerned about the “we” and more concerned about the “I”. This lowers conformity levels, because each person is willing to do what he/she wants and is more concerned about self-surival than harmony in the community. A strength of this study could be participant variability because it eliminates the possibility of this behavior only being limited to one type of person/community. Accordingly, a limitation could be the lack of ecological validity (one will not be asked to identify the length of a line in real life), and the multitude of confounding variables including the time and place, which could influence the results. Overall, the study demonstrates how individualism affects behavior, since a person who demonstrates indivdualistic behavior would exhibit less conformity, as seen above.

2. Individualism vs. collectivism (IDV): The extent to which a society is based on the needs of the individual as opposed to the needs of the group.

First, Individualism vs. Collectivism. Individualism is the social function of the relative likelihood of a free and individual means only take care of themselves and their families. By contrast, collectivism is the tendency of social functions relatively tight where each individual to identify themselves as a group with loyalty not need to be asked. The main problem of this dimension is the degree of interdependence of individuals in a