HOFSTEDE'S CONTRIBUTION TO CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Hofstede's Contribution to our Understanding of Cultural Differences

Hofstede's Contribution to our Understanding of Cultural Differences

Introduction

Dr. Geert Hofstede conducted perhaps the most comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. From 1967 to 1973, while working at IBM as a psychologist, he collected and analyzed data from over 100,000 individuals from forty countries. From those results, and later additions, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions to differentiate cultures. He later added a fifth dimension, Long-term Outlook.

Geert Hofstede's dimensions analysis can assist the business person or traveler in better understanding the intercultural differences within regions and between counties.

"Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster." - Dr. Geert Hofstede

As with any generalized study, the results may or may not be applicable to specific individuals or events. In addition, although the Hofstede's results are categorized by country, often there is more than one cultural group within that country. In these cases there may be significant deviation from the study's result. An example is Canada, where the majority of English speaking population and the minority French speaking population in Quebec have moderate cultural differences.

Discussion

The international and intercultural communication has become a subject of different studies and research in the last decade. The importance of the understanding of the relations and interactions between people from different places has increased since the world became a “small place”, the internet, communications, and businesses have made the world more active. Now it is possible to have information at the same time for several parts of the world, right in the computer, telephone, or television, but it is important to comprehend the meanings of the words and the actions in each society (Wardrope, 2005, pp 101 - 108).

Geert Hofstede, an expert on the interaction between national cultures and organizational cultures, made a statement about “national culture” in 1991: the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting are established by the late childhood. These patterns are part of the national cultural differences, which are manifest in a culture's choices of symbols, heroes, rituals and values (Shuter, 1999, pp 182 - 184). He worked for long time on the influence of this “national culture” on the behavior. His work has helped him to conclude that there are five different dimensions in communication (Welch, 2001, pp 92 - 99, ?.

Based on an empirical research data he initially identified four of such dimensions, related to four basic problems with which human societies have to cope: inequality, uncertainty, the relationship between the individual and the primary group, and the social role division between women and men (Ulijn, 2000, pp 112 -114).

Hofstede's Work on Cultural Differences

Armed with a large database of cultural statistics, Hofstede analyzed the results and found clear patterns of similarity and difference amid the responses along these five dimensions. Interestingly, his research was done on employees of IBM only, which allowed him to attribute the patterns to national ...