Using Trompenaar's Cultural Value Dimensions to Manage the Shift from the South African Management Environment to the Canadian Management Environment

I have decided to compare the United States to Canada. The reason for this choice is due to Canada sharing our borders. I felt it would be interesting to see how another country so close to the United States may compare and differ to the culture of our country. Based on Professor Geert Hofstede’s comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture, the United States and Canada rank closely in almost all values surveyed.

When it comes to work in Canada, it is totally evident that each workplace is unique. It has its own culture and unwritten rules which every newcomer should know and be familiar with them. In fact, when the new immigrants come to work in Canada they face various difficulties and challenges in their jobs. It is precisely for these reasons, the majority of the experts in the Canadian workplace culture confirm that there are some common tips which can help the newcomers to integrate into the Canadian workplace successfully.

Canadian workplaces today seem to be a fairly diverse place, with a blend of many religions, ethnicities, and genders present. However, although people preach affirmative action and melting pots in current times, many inequality and power issues still abound. One strikingly noticeable example is gender discrimination. Women in the workforce face many challenges like smaller wages, harassment, male privilege in hiring or promotions, and lack of support when pregnant or raising children. One half of the planet is women, and it can be assumed the same for Canada, but they still face judgment at work because they lack the authority to dispute against big corporations or even their male supervisor. It cannot be argued that

All Organisations posses a distinct form of culture with some having more than a single culture. This culture is usually very difficult to measure, change and most especially change.

As global markets grow more organization will benefit from cultural diversity training. This training is used to help the leadership learn about others cultures, beliefs, values, and behaviors that contribute to the development of a culture. My travels to Canada and The Philippines has made me aware of the cultural differences but also to value cultural diversity; therefore, cultural dimensions’ factors will help to compare Canada and The Philippines cultural differences and similarity.

Racial discrimination in the workplace has been a persistent theme in Canada’s history as well as present-day times. The occurrence of actions and attitudes that impose a sense of one being less equal than another on the basis of one’s race in Canada’s workplace inhibits both our nation’s ability to move forward as well as strengthen unification within our country. The belief in a more egalitarian society, where one’s race and ethnic background have little to no impact on employees (or potential employees) standings within the job market, would seemingly be reinforced by the majority of Canadians, who consistently show support for Canada’s multicultural identity. Couple that with the noticeable strides Canada has made in the past several

Daniel Kan Fourth period class Ms. Baylor’s Workplace essentials class The American and Canadian Dream eh Do they still exist And which is better? Canada is better (sorry)

Canada falls short in many areas, primarily in the basic international standard that “all issues that influence worker well-being should be negotiable” (Adams, 2008, p. 58). Constitutionally, Canada continues to enforce collective bargaining as an economic right, giving no credence to how social and political decisions in the workplace affect workers (Adams, 2008, p. 51). Even though the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed collective bargaining’s human right status in 2007’s BC Health Services Decision, it did not embrace the ILO’s standards fully (Savage, 2008, p. 72). There has been no tangible change in legislation or within the labour movement to denote any progress since that decision (Savage, 2008, p.

The Hofstede Centre (n.d.) defines culture as the “collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another.” Chipulu, Ojiako, Gardiner, Williams, Mota, Maguire, Shou, Stamai, and Marshall (2014), note that “culture can be at once tangible and observable; latent and unobservable; or even an abstraction altogether” (p. 367). Culture therefore has many dimensions. Some aspects of culture can be observed by analyzing symbols, ceremonies, dress, and other aspects. On the other hand, some aspects are not observable from the outside, but have to be experienced. Looking only from the outside gives us only a glimpse into the culture values. A large part of culture is the unwritten rules of how things are done. This part of culture is not necessarily observable to an outsider. To fully understand the cultural values of an organization, you need to be inside the organization with access to those with years of work experiences.

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.

Global Business Cultural Analysis: South Africa Raymond J. Landis BUSI 604-D06 LUO – International Business Professor – Dr. Stephen P. Preacher Liberty University May 13, 2011

Mismanaging cultural differences can render otherwise successful managers and organisations ineffective when working across cultures. As stated byOsland (1990, p. 4) ``The single greatest barrier to business success is the one erected by culture''. Hofstede (1983) defines culture as "the mental programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another" (Hofstede 1983 p. 25). Through the comparison of Chinese culture and Australian culture using Hofstedes five cross-cultural dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and long-term orientation an insightful view into the differences and similarities of the cultures can be obtained (Chong & Park 2003). Human Resource Management

With the unstoppable trend of globalisation, it becomes extremely significant for international businesses to have a thorough understanding of different cultures. Hofstede (1980, pp. 21-23) defines culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from another’. This essay examines Hofstede’s cultural framework and suggests that Hofstede’s cultural framework is an outstanding and authoritative tool to analyze culture differences. In this essay, cultural frameworks will be discussed firstly, following by a discussion of my cultural scores and background. Finally, recommendations on cross-cultural management between China and Australia will be provided.

The cost of overlooking culture is hard to quantify, but it can be substantial. Evidence suggests that companies that make even moderate adjustments to selection, training, and work design systems based on national cultural value differences in a normally functioning organization are likely to yield improvement in performance. This may translate into several million dollars of additional revenue annually for medium-sized organizations. More importantly, if management systems are devised without regard for culture or blindly generalized from one cultural environment to another, the result is often conflict, misunderstanding, dissatisfaction, undermined morale, and high turnover. The productivity losses due to this can easily lead to a complete business failure (2). This idea seem to be lost on DF who appear confrontational and unwilling to compromise their positions in the JV.

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.