INTRODUCTION

We look at the work of Fons Trompenaars who studied Economics at the Free University of

Amsterdam and later earned a Ph.D. from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Fons has

studied how people in specific countries resolve dilemmas. After analyzing problem resolution

behaviours, he identified 7 basic dimensions for culture.

Scale 1 : Universalism v Particularism

Universalism says good and bad can be defined for all circumstances; you see the world as being

black and white, with few shades of grey. Right is right, and wrong is wrong: a contract,

agreement or commitment is fixed and there is a clear distinction between what is true and a lie.

Typical universalist cultures are the USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Scandinavia, The

Netherlands, Switzerland, White South Africa, and Australia.

Particularism gives greater attention to the obligations of relationships and unique situations.

Would you give evidence against a friend who had been speeding and caused a traffic accident?

A contract is the basis for an agreement, rather than being fixed for all time – because people and

circumstances may change after you have signed it which means you reinterpret its conditions.

(Latin, African and Asian cultures)

Scale 2 : Individualism v Collectivism

Individualism leaves people free to contribute to the collective as and if they wish; ultimately,

however, they are free to take their own decisions and lead their lives as they will. Equally, you

are free to make your own mistakes, and there is little loss of face when you do. (UK, USA,

Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand)

Collectivism puts the emphasis on shared benefits and judges individuals by what they put in.

Should the team take responsibility for a mistake made by one member? Keeping face in relation

to the group becomes of great importance, and loss of face must be avoided at all costs. (Asian,

Arab, African and Latin cultures)

Scale 3: Neutral v Emotional

Neutral cultures spawn business relationships which are instrumental and focus on objectives

(UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic)

Emotional business dealings - involving anger, joy and passion - are acceptable at the other end

of the scale. If you are upset at work, you display your feelings (Polish, Italian, French, Spanish,

Latin American)

Scale 4 : Specific v Diffuse

Specific behaviour puts contractual before personal concerns; you put the job in hand first, and if

any relationships result, it is a bonus, but not a prerequisite of successful working. (USA, UK,

Switzerland, Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, White South Africa, Netherlands)

Diffuse behaviour overlaps the two sets of issues, and takes time to weave them together. You

spend as much time on the relationship as on the business. You overlap the personal and the

functional, and spend time outside working hours with your work colleagues and business

contacts (Argentina, Spain, Russia, India, China).

Scale 5 : Achievement v Ascription

Achievement-oriented attitudes judge you on what you have recently accomplished. (USA,

Canada, Australia)

Ascription-orientation awards status according to birth, kinship, gender, age, connections,

school. In your culture, does the “right” family name carry weight? (France, Italy, Japan)

Finally, as well as these five scales, Trompenaars also wrote about attitudes to time and the

environment. According to his latest book 21 Leaders for The 21st Century, Fons argues that

because business is run differently around the globe, there is a need for different managerial and

leadership competencies.

In a recent interview he said “If you look at the leadership literature and you read for example

the excellent work of Warren Bennis, you smell the Anglo-Saxon undertone of all this. This

becomes even more obvious when you read Les Grand Patrons on French leadership, where

personal history includes the village these leaders were raised and their attendance to one of the

Grands Ecoles. Nothing new, right? Then read a book on Chinese leadership and you conclude

that all leadership theories wrongly claim a universal set of traits or behaviours. What book will

you need to read when you deal with the increasingly more popular multi-cultural teams? In

short, we need a new paradigm of leadership that transcends culture. In our research we have

found that the only competence that truly matters is the competence to reconcile dilemmas or to

integrate opposites”.

Fons goes on to promote the idea of cultural “reconciliation”. He writes that foreign cultures

have an integrity, which only some members will abandon. People who abandon their culture

become weakened and corrupt. We need others to be themselves if partnership is to work. This is

why we need to reconcile differences, that is, to be ourselves, but yet see and understand how

other perspectives can help our own.

Once you are aware of your own mental models and cultural predispositions, and once you can

respect and understand that those of another culture are legitimately different, it then becomes

possible to reconcile differences. Why do this? Because we are in the business of creating wealth

and value, not just for ourselves, but for those who live in different cultural worlds. We need to

share the value of buying, selling, of joint venturing, of working in partnership.

What is reconciliation? In dealing with different cultures, you have several options:

Ignoring other cultures

One type of response is to ignore the other orientation. You are sticking to your own cultural

standpoint. Your style of decision-making is to either impose your own way of doing things

because it is your belief that your way of doing things and your values are best, or because you

have rejected other ways of thinking or doing things because you have either not recognized

them or have no respect for them.

Abandon your standpoint

Another response is to abandon your orientation and 'go native'. Here you adopt a 'when in

Rome, do as the Romans do' approach. Acting or keeping up such pretenses won't go unseen –

you will be very much an amateur. Other cultures will mistrust you – and you won't be able offer

your own strengths to the marriage.

Compromise

Sometimes do it your way. Sometimes give in to the others. But this is a win-lose solution or

even a lose-lose solution. Compromise cannot lead to a solution in which both parties are

satisfied – something has to give.

Reconciliation

What is needed is an approach where the two opposing views can come to fuse or blend – where

the strength of one extreme is extended by considering and accommodating the other. This is

reconciliation.

If you are able to do this, you and your organization develop the ability to reconcile cultural

differences and thereby become more effective in doing business and managing across cultures.

HOFSTEDE’S STUDY

A framework that has received a great deal of research attention is Hofstede’s (1980) classic

study of work values. Based on attitude surveys of 117,000 employees of a large U.S.

multinational corporation (later identified as IBM), Hofstede extracted four dimensions with

which he could classify the 40 different countries represented. These dimensions were named

individualism–collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity–femininity.

Individualism–collectivism is the extent to which one’s self-identity is defined according to

individual characteristics or by the characteristics of the groups to which the individual belongs

on a permanent basis, and the extent to which individual or group interests dominate. Power

distance is the extent to which power differences are accepted and sanctioned in a society.

Uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which societies focus on ways to reduce uncertainty and

create stability.

Masculinity–femininity is the extent to which traditional male orientations of ambition and

achievement are emphasized over traditional female orientations of nurturance and interpersonal

harmony. By giving each of the 40 countries a score ranging from 0 to 100 on each of the four

dimensions, Hofstede derived a classification of national cultures. The original sample was later

expanded to include 50 countries. It is particularly important to point out that Hofstede’s scores

were the average score for all participants in each country. Therefore, it is not appropriate to

infer that because two nations differ on a particular value dimension that any two individuals

from those countries will differ in the same way. That is, within each nation there might be

variation on a particular dimension, such that a particular individual will not be at all

representative of the mean score. For example, Figure 3.2 shows the hypothetical distribution of

individual scores on individualism–collectivism between a collectivist country (Malaysia) and an

individualist country (New Zealand). Hofstede (1980)called making the mistake of applying the

scores at the country level to individuals the ecological fallacy. Consistent with the individual

variation noted previously, it is also increasingly clear that the level of agreement between

individuals in a society about the importance of a particular value dimension can vary

systematically. That is, there can be differing degrees of consensus on any particular value

orientation. Recently, researchers have measured this intranational consensus, as the opposite of

variation, by examining differences in the standard deviation in measures of value orientations

across cultures (Au, 1999; Schwartz & Sagie, 2000). Although systematic differences in

consensus seem to exist, the implications for the degree of consensus in a society either overall

or on specific value orientations are only beginning to be understood. However, some evidence

suggests that value consensus is related to socioeconomic development and democratization of

societies (Schwartz & Sagie, 2000), and implications are proposed for organizational behavior

similar to those found for other types of heterogeneity (Au, 1999).

CONFUCIAN DYNAMISM

In an effort to investigate the possibility that Hofstede’s (1980) study might contain cultural bias

because it was developed in the West, a group of researchers conducted a subsequent study based

on Chinese values (Chinese Culture Connection, 1987). This survey was conducted in 23

countries and in a way similar to Hofstede’s original study. The factors were then compared with

those Hofstede obtained in the same countries. This study also indicated four underlying

dimensions of cultural value orientations:

• Integration, examples of which included tolerance, harmony, and solidarity with others; non

competitiveness, trustworthiness, and contentedness

• Human-heartedness, including kindness, patience, courtesy, and a sense of righteousness

• Confucian work dynamism, including order, thrift, persistence, and sense of shame

• Moral discipline, including moderation, being disinterested and pure, and having few desires

Even though the studies used measures based in very different cultures and were conducted with

different samples, substantial similarity was found for three of the four dimensions. In addition, a

new dimension, Confucian work dynamism (later called long- versus short-term orientation by

Hofstede [1991]) was found to be important in the Chinese culture. The dimensions of

individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, and power distance describe cultural

variations that held up under this additional analysis. That is, they were correlated with

dimensions found in the Chinese Culture Connection (1987) study. However, the fact that the

dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and Confucian dynamism did not correlate as highly with

dimensions derived in the other culture suggests these dimensions might be less universally

applicable.

CULTURAL DISTANCE

One of the benefits of quantitative measures of cultural dimensions, such as those described

previously, is the ability to construct indexes of cultural distance between countries. That is, it is

possible to address the question of how different national cultures are from each other, based on

the value orientations measured. For example, a measure of national cultural distance was

developed using Hofstede’s four cultural dimensions (Kogut & Singh, 1988). The measure is an

index, which is corrected for differences in the variances of each dimension and then

arithmetically averaged.

CRITICISM OF HOFSTEDE’S STUDY

Hofstede’s conceptualization of culture as a finite number of dimensions has found favor with

management researchers and has led to numerous studies using one or more of the dimensions to

explain observed differences across nations. However, it is not without critics (e.g., Dorfman &

Howell, 1988; Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). Hofstede’s arguments about the existence of

dimensions of cultural variation were consistent with other conceptions of cultural variation.

However, problems with the work focus on how he operationalized these constructs (Dorfman &

Howell, 1988). For example, Hofstede’s framework was developed from two surveys conducted

in 1968 and 1972 inside IBM, which limits the ability to generalize to other organizations whose

members might be systematically different. More serious, perhaps, is that the items in the survey

were not developed from any theoretical base but extracted from a broader survey designed to

assess employee satisfaction, perception of work, and personal beliefs and goals (Hofstede,

1991). Other methodological criticisms associated with the approach used include the following:

(a) A technical problem is associated with the mathematics of the factor analysis in that there

were too few data points for the number of questionnaire items

(b) two of the Hofstede dimensions were separated arbitrarily

(c) on the face of them, many of the items within dimensions seem to be unrelated to

each other

(d) many of the items related to several of the dimensions

Notwithstanding the criticism of Hofstede’s study, the four cultural dimensions seem to make

sense and have been validated in subsequent work.