Page 161 - Cultures and Organizations

140 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

tinction between a masculine and a feminine culture in society. They just
represent the aspects of this dimension that were represented by questions
in the IBM research. Again the correlations of the IBM country scores
with non-IBM data about other characteristics of societies allow for a full
grasp of what the dimension encompasses.
The differences in mental programming among societies related to
this new dimension are social but are even more emotional. Social roles
can be imposed by external factors, but what people feel while playing
them comes from the inside. This state of affairs leads us to the following
defi nition:

A society is called masculine when emotional gender roles are clearly
distinct: men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material
success, whereas women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and con-
cerned with the quality of life.
A society is called feminine when emotional gender roles overlap:
both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned
with the quality of life.

For the countries in the IBM database, masculinity index (MAS) values
were calculated in a way similar to individualism index values (Chapter
4). MAS was based on the country’s factor score in a factor analysis of the
fourteen work goals. Scores were put into a range from about 0 for the most
feminine country to about 100 for the most masculine country through
multiplying the factor scores by 20 and adding 50. For follow-up studies,
an approximation formula was used in which MAS was directly computed
from the mean scores of four work goals.
Country MAS scores are shown in Table 5.1. As with the scores for

power distance and individualism, the masculinity scores represent relative,
not absolute, positions of countries. Unlike with individualism, masculinity
is unrelated to a country’s degree of economic develop ment: we fi nd rich
and poor masculine and rich and poor feminine countries.
The most feminine-scoring countries (ranks 76 through 72) were Swe-
den, Norway, Latvia, the Netherlands, and Denmark; Finland came close
with a rank of 68. The lower third of Table 5.1 further contains some Latin
countries: Costa Rica, Chile, Portugal, Guatemala, Uruguay, El Salvador,
Peru, Spain, and France; and some Eastern European countries: Slovenia,
Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. From
Asia it contains Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, and Iran. Other femi-