DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior

International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior

Introduction

This paper describes briefly the Hofstede model of five dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism, Masculinity and Long Term Orientation. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The paper stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes with a look ahead in what the study of dimensions of national cultures and the position of countries on them may still bring(Merton, 1968).

Analysis

For those who work in international business, it is sometimes amazing how different people in other cultures behave. We tend to have a human instinct that 'deep inside' all people are the same - but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country - the chances are we'll make some very bad decisions. Culture has been defined in many ways; this author's shorthand definition is: "Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others". It is always a collective phenomenon, but it can be connected to different collectives. Within each collective there is a variety of individuals. If characteristics of individuals are imagined as varying according to some bell curve; the variation between cultures is the shift of the bell curve when one moves from one society to the other. Most commonly the term culture is used for tribes or ethnic groups (in anthropology), for nations (in political science, sociology and management), and for organizations (in sociology and management)(Hofstede, 2005).

A relatively unexplored field is the culture of occupations (for instance, of engineers versus accountants, or of academics from different disciplines). The term can also be applied to the genders, to generations, or to social classes. However, changing the level of aggregation studied changes the nature of the concept of 'culture'. Societal, national and gender cultures, which children acquire from their earliest youth onwards, are much deeper rooted in the human mind than occupational cultures acquired at university, or than organizational cultures acquired on the job.

The latter are exchangeable when people take a new job. Societal cultures reside in (often unconscious) values, in the sense of broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others . Organizational cultures reside rather in (visible and conscious) practices: the way people perceive what goes on in their organizational environment.

Hofstede Dimensions in a Nutshell

In this section I will summarize the content of each dimension opposing cultures with low and high scores. These oppositions are base on correlations with studies by others, and because the relationship is statistical, not every line applies equally strongly ...