Page 110 - Cultures and Organizations

92 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Measuring the Degree of Individualism in Society

Extreme collectivism and extreme individualism can be considered the
opposite poles of a second global dimension of national cultures, after
power distance (which was described in Chapter 3). All countries in the
IBM studies could be given an individualism index score that was low for
collectivist societies and high for individualist societies.

The new dimension is defined as follows: Individualism pertains to
societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to
look after him- or herself and his or her immediate family. Collectivism as its
opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onward are integrated
into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to
protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
Degrees of individualism obviously vary within countries as well as
among them, so it is again important to base the country scores on compa-
rable samples from one country to another. The IBM samples offered this
comparability.
The survey questions on which the individualism index is based belong
to a set of fourteen work goals. People were asked: “Try to think of those
factors that would be important to you in an ideal job; disregard the extent
to which they are contained in your present job. How important is it to you
to . . . “ followed by fourteen items, each to be scored on a scale from 1 (of
utmost importance to me) to 5 (of very little or no importance). When the
answer patterns for the respondents from forty countries on the fourteen

items were analyzed, they reflected two underlying dimensions. One was
individualism versus collectivism. The other came to be labeled masculinity
versus femininity (see Chapter 5).

The dimension to be identified with individualism versus collectivism
was most strongly associated with the relative importance attached to the

following work goal items:

For the individualist pole
1. Personal time: have a job that leaves you sufficient time for your per-

sonal or family life
2. Freedom: have considerable freedom to adopt your own approach to
the job
3. Challenge: have challenging work to do—work from which you can
get a personal sense of accomplishment