Page 141 - Cultures and Organizations

120 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

of the in-group belongs to the normal expectations in such a society. Often
earnings have to be shared with relatives.
The hiring process in a collectivist society always takes the in-group

into account. Usually, preference is given to hiring relatives, first of all of
the employer, but also of other persons already employed by the company.
Hiring persons from a family one already knows reduces risks. Also, rela-
tives will be concerned about the reputation of the family and help to cor-
rect misbehavior of a family member. In the individualist society, family
relationships at work are often considered undesirable, as they may lead to
nepotism and to a confl ict of interest. Some companies have a rule that if
one employee marries another, one of them has to leave.
The workplace itself in a collectivist society may become an in-group
in the emotional sense of the word. This is more the case in some countries
than in others, but the feeling that it should be this way is nearly always
present. The relationship between employer and employee is seen in moral
terms. It resembles a family relationship with mutual obligations of pro-
tection in exchange for loyalty. Poor performance of an employee in this
relationship is no reason for dismissal: one does not dismiss one’s child.
Performance and skills, however, do determine what tasks one assigns to
an employee. This pattern of relationships is best known from Japanese
organizations. In Japan it applies in a strict sense only to the group of
permanent employees, which may be less than half of the total workforce.
Japan scores halfway on the IDV scale. In individualist societies, the rela-
tionship between employer and employee is primarily conceived of as a
business transaction, a calculative relationship between buyers and sellers
in a labor market. Poor performance on the part of the employee and a
better pay offer from another employer are both legitimate and socially
accepted reasons for terminating a work relationship.

Christopher Earley, a management researcher from the United States,
has illustrated the difference in work ethos between an individualist and a
collectivist society very neatly with a laboratory experiment. In the experi-
ment forty-eight management trainees from southern China and forty-
eight matched management trainees from the United States were given
an “in-basket task.” The task consisted of forty separate items requiring
between two and five minutes each, such as writing memos, evaluating

plans, and rating job candidates’ application forms. Half of the participants
in each country were given a group goal of two hundred items to be com-
pleted in an hour by ten people; participants in the other half were each
given an individual goal of twenty items. Also, half of the participants in