Managing Internationalisation - Patricia Adam

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theory. Since its first publication Hofstede’s work is cited extensively in scientific articles worldwide. It influenced consultants and professionals in many areas all over the world focussing on human resource management, leadership training and varied business applications.4

Culture as a Part of Human Mental Programming

      Hofstede was fascinated by Human Mental Programming and strived to understand how people’s values and beliefs were formed. When dealing with humans, three unique levels of mental programming can be distinguished (Figure 2-4):

      Figure 2-4: Three Levels of Uniqueness in Human Mental Programming5

      The basic level, labelled “human nature”, steers the basic programmes of the mind every child inherits. The resulting behavioural patterns and reactions like fear, joy, love and the need to band together with others are universal for all human beings. The second level is specific for a certain group or category of human beings and is referred to as “culture”. The “dos” and “don’ts” of this level are learned from other members of the group. The third level forms the personality. The resulting behaviour is, by concept, partly inherited and partly learned.

      Based on these levels of human mental programming culture is defined by Hofstede as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others”6.

      Figure 2-5: The Hofstede Onion: Manifestations of Culture7

      Culture manifests itself on different levels that can be depicted as an onion as introduced in Figure 2-5. The innermost level consists of values, defined as “broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others”8 and defines if something is deemed as for example moral or immoral, dirty or clean or else evil or good. Values are hidden deeply and cannot be perceived whereas the three following levels of culture can be observed openly, forming the cultural practices. These consist of rituals, heroes and symbols. Rituals are socially essential collective activities. They serve group matters like reinforcing group behaviour or ensuring group cohesiveness and include the way greetings are carried out or the way language is used. Rituals cover far more than only official or religious ceremonies. A typical example is the French way of kissing on the cheek when greeting friends and acquaintances. Cultural heroes serve as role models for desirable behaviour. They show characteristics that are highly respected in a particular culture. Barbie’s beauty, Asterix’s cleverness or Batman’s sense of justice are typical examples. Symbols form the surface area of culture. They include all kinds of gestures, words, objects or pictures that carry a particular meaning that is familiar only to those who are part of the same culture. Typical group symbols are special expressions (“jargon”), status symbols, dresses or hairstyles. Symbols are subject to quick changes and are easily copied by others.

An Introduction to Hofstede’s Dimensions

      Hofstede’s research dates back to the 1960s when he worked together with IBM and created a questionnaire in order to analyse the values of similar IBM employees in different countries. The “IBM Study” revealed universal problems, but with solutions that differed from country to country. The problems could be clustered in the areas “social inequality”, including the relationship with authority; “the relationship between the individual and the group”; “concepts of masculinity and femininity”, concerning the social implications of having been born as a boy or a girl and “the ways of dealing with uncertainty”, relating to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions. These four areas of basic problems were understood to represent independent dimensions of cultures.

      In 1985 Chinese researchers developed a Chinese Values Survey (CVS) that produced one dimension that was not correlated with any of the dimensions Hofstede used so far. It was based mainly on typical Confucian principles and dealt with an orientation towards the future or towards the past. This concept was added 1991 as a fifth dimension to the Hofstede model, at first using only the scores for the 23 countries included in the CVS.

      A “dimension” is seen as an aspect of one culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. Consequently, the discovered basic problem areas correspond to five dimensions that form a model of differences among all kinds of cultures – for example gender cultures, professional cultures, company cultures or national cultures. An overview of the five Hofstede dimensions and their measurement scales in the shape of a control panel is provided in Figure 2-6. The dark-blue controllers denote one culture, the light blue controllers another culture. Their position on each scale represents the average value of their culture concerning the contemplated dimension.

      Figure 2-6: Hofstede’s Five Dimensions as a Control Panel

      Hofstede’s model gains its importance from the fact that his findings were repeatedly verified in replica studies. For example, six major replications of his IBM research were carried out by different researchers from 1990 to 2002, using people from different backgrounds (elites, employees, pilots, consumers, municipals, bank employees) and comparing between 14 and 28 countries. All studies confirmed the first four dimensions of the Hofstede research as valid. Consequently, this 5-dimensional Hofstede model is currently the most renowned cultural framework in the business environment. The basis for the cultural comparison is regularly widened and the number of countries integrated broadened. In the most recent editions of the Hofstede model, more than 90 different countries are characterized by a score on each of the five cultural dimensions.

      Before continuing with the application of this framework to different countries it is important to emphasize that the scores mentioned below are mean scores of all survey participants of each culture, computed of the values given for the respective survey items in defined ways. Therefore, the scores do not at all imply that all people of one culture are equal. As Hofstede remarks concerning his Power Distance Index: the correlation on the country scores on the three underlying questions are more than 0.5, providing a coherent pattern for distinguishing one country from another. At the same time, the correlation across the individual answers to these questions is nearly zero.9 This emphasizes that such a concept only measures characteristics of systems, not of individuals.

      In the following chapters, each of the five dimensions will be explained in detail.

Power Distance

      The Power Distance Index (PDI) measures the degree of inequality in a group or society. This concept was derived from three items of the original survey that were answered by non-managerial employees only: their anxiety to express disagreement with their managers, the perception of their supervisor’s decision-making style and their personal preference for their supervisor’s decision-making style. The PDI provides the group-specific answers to the basic question of how to handle the fact that people are unequal. Typical characteristics of countries with large power distance in comparison to countries with small power distance are depicted in Figure 2-7. It is to be noted that not every country with a high PDI shows all typical characteristics because some of these might not fit to typical characteristics of other dimensions. This is true for all tables showing key differences in opposite culture scores. This highlights the fact that countries with comparable scores in one dimension are not similar. Although they share the same basic idea, its expression in forms of cultural artefacts (as behaviour, customs and the like) is very individual. In large PDI countries, for example, the use of status

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