Two Different Theories about the Dimensions of National Culture - Essay Example

In this age of service outsourcing when physical and time distances are loosing their strengths as barriers to foreign investment so that local firmswithout venturing abroad are having to compete with foreign rivals To say that we live in an era of Globalization in present times would be nothing if not repetition of a cliché (Tsui, Nifadkar and Ou, 2007). The present business world thus does aptly justify the metaphors of a “flat world” (Friedman, 2005) or a “global village” (Ger, 1999). Even a casual glance at the present global demographic features is enough to perceive the fact that Globalization is a force that will only grow in its influence on all major frontiers in everyday life. The very uneven distribution in terms of magnitude and density of population across the globe which continues to grow by the minute makes increased interactions across cultures for purposes of mass livelihood through participation in the integrated markets inevitable. This fact in turn, leads to the process of understanding the notion of ‘culture’ itself assuming enhanced importance to ensure efficient and effective and thus profitable participation in the world where all trans-national boundaries are being reduced to only geographical distinctions over time. Culture thus assumes one of the lead roles in both national and international strategic management decisions (Weick, 1985). There are various definitions stemming from differential perceptions of the concepts that have been developed by various authors from different as well as similar academic groups. The primal objective of the present endeavour is to comparatively present and critically evaluate two different theories of culture, one derived by Hofstede (1980) and the other by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) as adapted by Lane, DiStefano and Maznevski (2006), which strive to present the concept in measurable terms, in terms of efficacy and applicability in people management purposes. I shall be arguing that Hofstede’s exposition suits the purpose of people management more effectively as it covers a wider spectrum of dimensions that are through his methodology measurable and comparable thus contributing more to developing a comparative understanding of different cultures methodically and even more so as it provides a platform which can be effectively incorporated in strategic management to identify and ensure efficient usage of cultural differences to the advantage of an organization (Bartlett and Ghoshal,1992). In what follows we shall go through brief overviews of the two approaches to culture and then move on to evaluate the degree of usefulness of each of them in turn on grounds of usefulness in people management Hofstede’s approach views culture as “the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes the members of one human group from other.” Culture, thus in this sense incorporates systems of values; and these values themselves are in turn among the building blocks of culture (Hofstede, 1980). Economic and political philosophies, education, religion, language and social structure are thus factors that counteract upon the set of norms and values that constitute a culture. These factors are also acted upon by the culture itself and this interlinked process of interaction between a culture and factors related through this two way linkage thereby lend a dynamism to the process of morphing of a culture into a new or modified form that may or may not resemble but still remains a derivative of the original form. Hofstede initially researched the cultural features of 72 countries, by surveying 160,000 managers and employees within IBM Corp and this process was done twice and identified the following four main dimensions that, according to him, summarised a culture: The power distance - Essentially reflects the attitude towards the fact that people are inherently unequal in terms of physical and intellectual abilities of the less capable individuals in a particular society. Individualism and Collectivism – Refers to the magnitude of integration of individuals in groups. Masculinity and Femininity – This dimension addresses the distribution of roles among the genders. It evaluates a society from the perspective of whether its dominant features are essentially masculine or feminine in nature based on a set of preconceived notions of these. Uncertainty Avoidance – The extent to which a member of a particular cultural society were programmed to be uncomfortable with ambiguity or uncertainty. Another survey later revealed another dimension which was termed as The Confusion Dynamism, which essentially dealt with ethical norms in the work place and evaluated a culture according to the degree of respect it exhibited for tradition (Hofstede, 1991). That all these dimensions bear considerable significance in people management in different organizational structures can be perceived once their true natures are comprehended. Power distance, for instance, reflects the degree of tolerance people belonging to a particular culture have for inequality in all major spheres of life. This interpretation then implies that cultures that feature high power distance will promote and more importantly appreciate organisation structures that have characters like centralised decision making, large number of supervisors per worker and autocratic or hierarchal leadership while those featuring low power distance relations will promote and appreciate organisation structures with decentralised decision making, lesser number of supervisors per worker and participatory leadership (Landy & Conte, 2004). The dimension of Uncertainty Avoidance when perceived to be the determinant of the extent to which a culture will prefer structured and tailor made situations to unstructured ones will thereby have strong influences in determining aspects like the degree of acceptance to technical solutions, extent of loyalty to the employer and the strength of the constraint created by rules that is imposed upon innovators (Landy & Conte, 2004). Individualism Vs Collectivism as a cultural parameter captures the extent to which people prefer to act and ensure benefits as individuals compared to acting and benefiting as a group. National cultures that are individualism centric thereby differ from collectivism centered ones in that individual identity and responsibility are stressed upon more, goals and achievements are much more individual oriented. Collectivism oriented cultures on the other hand exhibit preference for group based identity and decisions are made with benefit of the group as prior objective in mind. Groups themselves extend support for members in exchange for loyalty to the group. This sets the stage for the organizational implications of this dimension. Greater individualism at the organizational level will thus imply individual incentive based motives for employees, which thereby translates into failure to perform at individual levels legitimate causes for dismissing employees and training shall also focus on development of individual skills. Predictably, lower individualism in organizational structures lead to employee participation and performance targeting interest of his or her group and group based training. It also leads to re-assignment in case of target achievement failures by groups rather than individual dismissals. Distinguishing between Masculinity and Femininity oriented cultures essentially centres on identification of the distribution of roles across different genders. This identification thus seeks to understand the dominance or prevalence of certain values specific to each gender. Cultures that value assertiveness, success and competition highly may be regarded to be dominantly masculine whereas those stressing the importance of aspects like quality of life, maintenance of warm personal relationships, service, care for the weak, solidarity etc, may be regarded to be predominantly feminine in nature (Hofstede, 1980). High degree of masculinity for organizations thus implies the features like fewer women professionals and stress upon traditional gender roles, while those low on masculinity exhibit the exact opposite features (Landy & Conte, 2004). However in spite of such significant implications of the dimensions of culture in Hofstede’s approach, it was not free from criticism. First of all the study was challenged by arguments that pointed out methodological flaws stating surveys were not a proper way of exploring the notion of culture. It was also pointed out that using nations as basic units was not adequate (Cooper, 1982). Apart from such arguments against the basic methodology, the generalization of the results were also questioned and it was pointed out that a survey of a subsidiaries of a firm was not enough to approximate and thus provide comprehensive information about national cultures (Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). Some critics pointed out that IBM data was obsolete and this implied the irrelevance of the results in present times1. The existence of such criticism justifies the quest for alternative theoretical explorations and interpretations of the notion of culture. This serves as the motive for evaluating the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck approach (1961) as adapted by Lane, DiStefano and Maznevski (2006). This approach explains the nature of culture to be related to the concepts of values, that are defined to be the explicit or implicit preferences influencing the choice from the available set of modes, means and ends of action, attitudes, which express values and influences actions towards something and finally behaviour, which simply is the way or manner in which human actions manifest. Behaviours of peoples are determined by their cultures (Adler, 2008). For example although public nudity is not acceptable to most cultures, taking baths together for males and females alike is a ritualistic part of Japanese culture. So, in essence, culture creates values which then determine the attitudes and these in turn influence behaviour which in turn influences culture. The approach under consideration also divides culture according to its level or type into Global, National, Regional, Ethnic and Corporate type cultures. It argues that there are in fact six perceptible dimensions of a culture. These are as follows: Individual – Based upon bestowed notions of good and evil by a culture. World – Relates to whether the members perceive the world from dominating or subjugating perspectives Human Relations – Essentially looks at the perspective adopted by a culture towards the significance of the individual in relation to hierarchical groups. Activity – addresses the aspect of control of activities by individual members of the culture, i.e, it distinguishes between cultures according to the differential stances these exhibit regarding their notions of activity as a state of doing or being. Time – Is the dimension that seeks to measure and address the association of a culture to its present in relation to its past and future, Space – Generates a distinguishable parameter by pointing out the stance adopted by different cultures regarding private or public utilisation of space. Although insights in these dimensions may be argued to be relatively more adequate in that a broader spectrum is covered and these factors are much better indicators of cultural traits than those used by Hofstede, I shall argue against this approach primarily on two grounds. First, as mentioned earlier, this comparative analysis seeks to identify the approach that will prove to be of greater use in people management and in this pursuit, I feel the Hofstede method triumphs simply because it provides a set of dimensions that help greatly in identifying the aspects that are essential for people management in which cultures differ crucially. This theory provides a framework that demonstrates the exact impacts cultural differences have in generating wide variations in social norms as well as individual behaviour and how these differences influence the effectiveness of different forms of organization and management systems (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1992). This allows us to adopt the framework to identify the important cultural factors and structure the strategies to respond to these so that efficient participation can be ensured. The second point that I wish to make is that some of the dimensions that have been derived in the second mentioned approach are not exclusive in that the concepts are actually overlaps to the dimensions presented in Hofstede’s approach thus rendering them to be of unoriginal in nature. For instance the criterion of the human relations dimension conceptually is very similar to and is actually more applicable when explored as the concept of individualism versus collectivism as done by Hofstede (Chapman, 1997). This might be explained by the fact that the dimensions are adoptions of the ideas presented in Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) which chronologically precedes Hofstede’s theory some of the dimensions of which thus may have been derived as refinements of the earlier theory. In fact the all the dimensions explored by Hofstede have been hailed to be superior in their generality and applicability and most importantly measurability that allows effective comparability between cultures (Eysenck, 1981; Triandis, 1982; Sorge, 1983). Observe that all the dimensions presented in the second approach although may have deeper philosophical implications none of them carry more practical significance compared to Hofstede’s measures thereby reducing them to vague philosophical yardsticks of culture that have relatively low significance when we consider our primal goal of applicability in strategic management across cultural borders as these criteria although tell us whether a particular culture looks at the perception of space as public or private or how much in control of activities individuals belonging to particular cultures aspire to be, it by no means explores how individuals react to inequality or rather how much supervision they are willing to tolerate as does the Hofstede approach.. So, what emerges is that, although the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck approach (1961) as adapted by Lane, DiStefano and Maznevski (2006) may arguably offer deeper insights into a culture when we attempt solitary philosophical or ideological explorations, Hofstede’s approach is better able to identify the cultural differences that are important for people management due to their fore-mentioned practical implications in organizational structures and it is this aspect which allows to develop a scale that can rank cultures according to these attributes thus allowing practical insights essential for managing people from different cultural backgrounds. “Hofstede’s work is used and admired at a very high level of generalization. Those who take country scores in the various dimensions as given realities, informing or confirming other research, do not typically inquire into the detail of the procedures through which specific empirical data were transmuted into generalization. Hofstede, of course, provides all the background one could wish for about these procedures, and that is another reason for admiring his work” (Chapman, 1997) What then about the previously mentioned criticisms to Hofstede’s approach? Some have been refuted. For instance, to the argument regarding the methodological flaws like using surveys to measure culture and using nations to represent cultural units Hofstede (2001) himself admits that surveys should not be the only way of measuring culture but that does not render surveys as inadequate and to the second methodological critic he argues that although it is true that nations are not perfect representatives of a culture, in the absence of any other usable unit they serve the purpose of conveying some information which is better than conveying nothing. Regarding the criticism of generalising the computations found for one subsidiary of a company to such large theoretical implications it can be counter argued that the study sought to measure differences between national cultures and not the cultures themselves and this purpose was adequately served thus justifying the generalisation (Hofstede. 2001). The argument that IBM data were old and obsolete also is rendered irrelevant once one tales note of the fact that the dimensions are assumed to have ancient roots and moreover data that remained stable over the course of two surveys were retained. It is these validations that lent so much weightage to this approach. Another pertinent point to make in this context is that this approach since then has been through various empirical and theoretical examinations and none of the dimensions have been invalidated yet. The final argument was regarding the number of dimensions. Some critics like McSweeney (2002) pointed out that four or five dimensions were not adequate to capture all facets of a culture which thus indicates at the creation of further dimensions. But these dimensions to be original and new and have to be “both conceptually and statistically independent from the five dimensions already defined and they should be validated by significant correlations with conceptually related external measures.” (Hofstede, 2001). It is this very aspect which in my opinion, proves to be a prime hindrance on the path of glory for the other approach. It suffers from being able to generate dimensions that effectively and practically measure culture and are original in being conceptually and statistically independent of the existing set in Hofstede approach. There are certain criticisms to this approach that have not been refuted but as Chapman, (1997) points out they have been already pointed out by Hofstede himself who presents his approach more as a building block, a platform to build upon that serves in indicating the direction in which organizational culture research should be directed rather than as the final truth that settles every issue in question. “There is perhaps no other contemporary framework in the general field of “culture and business” that is so general, so broad, so alluring, and so inviting to argument and fruitful disagreement” (Chapman, 1997). The approach adopted by Hofstede therefore bears much greater practical importance for the field of people management that requires in depth understanding of the impacts of cultural differences on people. References: Adler, J. N. & Gundersen, A. (2008). International Dimensions of Organizational Behaviour (5th ed) Mason, OH: Thomson Bartlett, C. 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