Page 192 - Cultures and Organizations

168 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

fewer hours worked in the Netherlands. The differences (percent preferring
salary minus percent preferring fewer hours) were signifi cantly correlated
with MAS more than with national wealth. Although respondents in the
poorer countries stressed the need for increasing salaries more, values
(MAS) played a stronger role. 54
Boys in a masculine society are socialized toward assertiveness, ambi-
tion, and competition. When they grow up, they are expected to aspire to
career advancement. Girls in a masculine society are polarized between
some who want a career and most who don’t. The family within a feminine
society socializes children toward modesty and solidarity, and in these
societies both men and women may or may not be ambitious and may or
may not want a career.
The feminine side of management opens possibilities in any culture for
women managers, who may be better able to combine manège and ménage
than men. U.S. researcher Anne Statham interviewed matched groups of
female and male U.S. managers and their secretaries, and she concluded
that the women predominantly saw job and people orientation as inter-
dependent, while to the men they were each other’s opposites. 55
Worldwide there is no relationship between the masculinity or femi-
ninity of a society’s culture and the distribution of employment over men
and women. An immediate relationship between a country’s position on
this dimension and the roles of men and women exists only within the
home. Outside the home, men have historically dominated, and only in the
wealthier countries—and this only recently in history—have women in

any numbers been sufficiently freed from other constraints to be able to
enter the worlds of work and politics as men’s equals. Lower-class women
have entered work organizations before, but only in low-status, low-paid

jobs—not out of a need for self-fulfillment, but rather out of a need for
material survival of the family. Statistics therefore show no relationship

between a country’s share of women work ing outside the home per se and
its degree of femininity. Feminine wealthier countries do have more work-
ing women in higher-level technical and professional jobs. 56
Many jobs in business demand few skills and cause a qualitative under-
employment of people. A need for “humanization of work” has been felt in
industrialized masculine as well as feminine countries, but what is consid-
ered a humanized job depends on one’s model of what it means to be human.
In masculine cultures, a humanized job should give more opportunities
for recognition, advancement, and challenge. This is the principle of job