Page 111 - Cultures and Organizations

I, We, and They 93

For the opposite, collectivist pole
4. Training: have training opportunities (to improve your skills or
learn new skills)
5. Physical conditions: have good physical working condit ions (good
ventilation and lighting, adequate work space, etc.)
6. Use of skills: fully use your skills and abilities on the job

If the IBM employees in a country scored work goal 1 as relatively impor-
tant, they generally also scored 2 and 3 as important but scored 4, 5, and
6 as unimportant. Such a country was considered individualist. If work
goal 1 was scored as relatively unimportant, the same generally held for 2
and 3, but 4, 5, and 6 would be scored as relatively more important. Such
a country was considered collectivist.
Obviously, these items from the IBM questionnaire do not totally
cover the distinction between individualism and collectivism in a society.
They only represent the issues in the IBM research that relate to this dis-
tinction. The correlations of the IBM individualism country scores with
non-IBM data about other characteristics of societies confi rm (validate)
the claim that this dimension from the IBM data does indeed measure
individualism.

It is not difficult to identify the importance of personal time, freedom,
and (personal) challenge with individualism: they all stress the employee’s
independence from the organization. The work goals at the opposite pole—
training, physical conditions, and skills being used on the job—refer to
things the organization does for the employee and in this way stress the

employee’s dependence on the organization, which fits with collectivism.
Another link in the relationship is that, as will be shown, individualist
countries tend to be rich, while collectivist countries tend to be poor. In
rich countries, training, physical conditions, and the use of skills may be

taken for granted, which makes them relatively unimportant as work goals.
In poor countries, these things cannot at all be taken for granted: they are
essential in distinguishing a good job from a bad one, which makes them
quite important among one’s work goals.
The actual calculation of the individualism index is not, as in the case
of power distance, based on simply adding or subtracting question scores

after multiplying them by a fixed number. The statistical procedure used
to identify the individualism dimension and, in Chapter 5, the masculin-
ity dimension (a factor analysis of the country scores for the fourteen work