Hofstede’s Dimensions:
A High-Level Analytical Tool
for Working Internationally
By John W. Bing, Ed.D.
Background
One of the success stories in the always tentative
relationship between academic scholarship and business and industry is
to be found in the area of cross-cultural business training. In the
early eighties, company training for international staff was rare, and
employees were often sent to the far ends of the earth with little information
as to what they would find there, much less how to successfully conduct
business.
Such training was often anecdotal, with returned
employees or others dominating programs with "war stories," personal experiences
suffered or enjoyed at the far corners of the world. Such programs
not only lacked depth; they seldom gave an accurate picture of the places
and people under review.
Over the past ten years there has been a change
in business sentiment towards increasing the availability of international
training. The largest global companies have by-and-large determined
that the cost of not training relocating employees is too high in terms
of early returnees and low productivity; and the programs themselves have
increasingly relied on research rather than anecdotes as fundamental learning
blocks.
Program Types and Levels
The programs offered to employees of international
businesses today may be categorized according to their levels, or in terms
of the tools utilized. Note that the cross-cultural training described
in Levels II and III provides participants with a framework that
enables them to deal with situations not covered directly in the training,
whereas Level I training usually does not.
Level I
These programs offer the "Do’s and Don’ts" of
international business, often mixing information about etiquette with advice
on what types of business gifts to give and how to best form business relationships
in other countries. They also may provide specific information about
travel, banking, embassies, etc. These programs are most useful for
employees with little or no international business experience. In
the words of the old fable, these programs provide people with fish, rather
than teaching them how to fish. At the end of these programs, participants
have a good idea of how to conduct specific business transactions, but
little idea how to generalize to other situations.
Level II
Level II programs teach participants how to fish;
that is, they provide analytic tools which can be used to understand the
relationship between culture and business. They do this by providing
models of cultures based on research in the field of comparative sociology
or anthropology. Participants learn to understand social and business
transactions by applying these analytic tools, and are often tested through
the use of critical incidents or case studies. At the end of these
programs, participants are able to analyze general culture-based business
transactions to determine how, in a specific culture, the business transaction
might be different from the transaction in their own cultures.
Level III
At this level, specific information (typical of
Level I) and analytic tools (provided in Level II) are brought to bear
on:
1. Specific business problems or opportunities
(such as sales or marketing, mergers or acquisitions) within the area of
these employees’ professional scope
2. Assisting employees with relocation to other
countries
3. Decision-making at upper levels (e.g., where
to locate a new plant in a region)
At the end of these sessions, participants are
able to apply the analytic tools and specific country, regional, and culture-based
information to business problems in their areas of expertise.
The Hofstede Dimensions
Geert Hofstede Is Professor Emeritus of Management,
University of Limburg at Maastricht, the Netherlands and the founder and
first Director there of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation
(IRIC). His work Culture’s Consequences is a pioneering work
in sociology, the first approach to utilize survey research to provide
quantitative comparisons in over fifty countries on the influence of culture
in the workplace.
The four Hofstede Dimensions, which follow, have
been utilized in Level II and III programs and represent the highest levels
of scholarship; that is, their relationship to real cultural variables
has been established through research and testing. They represent
a kind of cultural map of the world. These dimensions (a fifth dimension
was added later, "Long-Term vs. Short-Term Orientation" which focuses on
the differences between East Asian countries and the rest of the world)
have been researched through questionnaires provided to IBM employees and
the results yield numeric values by which countries can be compared on
these dimensions. From that research has come didactic tools, including
a questionnaire which helps individuals understand their own cultural profiles.
Knowing one’s own cultural profile assists individuals in understanding
others, and in understanding how business transactions may differ according
to the four dimensions.
Hofstede’s four dimensions (as described and interpreted
in the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™
system, a didactic tool used in instructional programs) are:
• Individualism: The degree of individual
or group orientation
• Power Distance: The level of preference
for equality or inequality within groups
• Certainty: The preference for risk vs.
structure
• Achievement: The relative degrees of
relationship vs. task orientation. This dimension also tracks the
relative masculine and feminine influences in the workplace.
These dimensions, then, along with the research-based
quantitative data and the questionnaire, are useful for Level II and III
programs as a tested, analytic tool to provide participants improved skills
in conducting international business.
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