Page 120 - Cultures and Organizations

I, We, and They 99

Geert had earlier related collectivism to the distinction between in-
groups and out-groups, and Misho’s WVS dimension of exclusionism ver-
sus universalism turned out to be strongly negatively correlated with IDV.
For forty-one countries that were part of Geert’s original IBM set, IDV

predicted 59 percent of universalism in the WVS, thirty-five years later, a
strong validation of the IBM database. 4
The distinction of in-group versus out-group, previously described
in Chapter 1, is a central aspect of cultural collectivism. The correlation
between exclusionism and IDV is strong but not perfect. A comparison
of the rankings of forty-one countries from the IBM database on indi-
vidualism and on exclusionism finds six countries that score considerably

more universalist than could be predicted on the basis of their IDV scores:
Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Slovenia, Finland, and Sweden. Their cultures
according to their WVS data are more open to out-group members than
expected. Five other countries score much more exclusionist than their
IDV scores predict: India, Italy, Turkey, Iran, and the Philippines. Their
cultures are more hostile to out-group members than expected.
Universalism implies respect for other cultures. The Eurobarometer
in 2008 asked representative samples of the population in twenty-six coun-
tries to choose “the most important values for you personally” (three out
of a list of twelve). One of these values was “respect for other cultures.”
Differences among countries in percentages of respondents choosing this
answer related primarily to IDV. 5

Individualism and Collectivism in Other
Cross-National Studies

Table 2.1 listed six major replications of the IBM research, published

between 1990 and 2002. Five of these, covering between fifteen and twenty-
eight countries from the IBM set, produced IDV scores signifi cantly cor-
related with the original IBM scores. As in the case of PDI (Chapter 3),
6
the various replications did not sufficiently agree to justify changing the

score of any of the countries. The original IBM set still served as the best
common denominator for the various studies.
Bond’s Chinese Value Survey study among students in twenty-three
countries, described in Chapter 2, produced an integration dimension, on
which the countries positioned themselves largely in the same way as they