Page 102 - Cultures and Organizations

84 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

by barbarians (such as England), and in former colonies of these entities.
Thus, some roots of the mental program called power distance go back at
least to Roman times—two thousand years ago. Countries with a Chinese
(Confucian) cultural inheritance also cluster on the medium to high side of
the power distance scale—and they carry a culture at least four thousand
years old.
None of us was present when culture patterns started to diverge
between peoples: the attribution of causes for these differences is a matter
of educated speculation on the basis of historical and prehistorical sources.
Both the Roman and the Chinese Empires were ruled from a single power
center, which presupposes a population prepared to take orders from the
center. The Germanic part of Europe, on the other hand, was divided into
small tribal groups under local lords who were not inclined to accept direc-
tives from anybody else. It seems a reasonable assumption that early state-
hood experiences helped to develop in these peoples the common mental
programs necessary for the survival of their political and social systems.
The question remains, of course, as to why these early statehood expe-
riences deviated. One way of supporting the guesswork for causes is to
look for quantitative data about countries that might be correlated with the
power distance scores. A number of such quantitative variables were avail-
able. Stepwise regression, described in Chapter 2, allowed us to select from
these variables the ones that successively contributed most to explaining
the differences in PDI scores in Table 3.1. The result is that a country’s PDI
score can be fairly accurately predicted from the following:

■ The country’s geographic latitude (higher latitudes associated with
lower PDI)
■ Its population size (larger size associated with higher PDI)

■ Its wealth (richer countries associated with lower PDI) 34
Geographic latitude (the distance from the equator of a country’s capi-
tal city) alone allows us to predict 43 percent of the differences (the vari-

ance) in PDI values among the fifty countries in the original IBM set.
Latitude and population size together predicted 51 percent of the variance;
and latitude, population size, plus national wealth (per capita gross national
income in 1970, the middle year of the survey period), predicted 58 percent.