Page 239 - Cultures and Organizations

212 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Sweden very low. A mixed team of engineers and technicians from both
nations worked on the design of a new model. After a few years the ven-
ture was dissolved. French and Swedish social scientists interviewed the

actors to find out what went wrong and possibly learn from the experience.
D’Iribarne described what they found:

In the joint team, the French rather than the Swedes produced the more
innovative designs. French team members did not hesitate to try out new
ideas and to defend these aggressively. The Swedes, on the other hand,
were constantly seeking consensus. The need for consensus limited what
ideas they could present, even what ideas they could conceive of. To the
Swedes the expression of ideas was subject to the need for agreement
between people; to the French, it was only subject to the search for technical
truth. The French were primarily concerned with the quality of decisions;
the Swedes with the legitimacy of the decision process. In the negotiations
within the team, the French usually won. They had the support of their
superiors who were involved all along, while the Swedish superiors had
delegated the responsibility to the team members and were nowhere to be
seen. The danger of this asymmetric structure was discovered too late. A
mutual distrust had developed at top management level that led to the
termination of the venture. 44

This case suggests that stronger uncertainty avoidance does not necessar-
ily constrain creativity, not does weaker uncertainty avoidance guarantee
its free flow. Comparing the conclusions by Shane and by d’Iribarne, we

are also warned that the results of social research are not independent of
the nationality of the researcher.
The IBM surveys had found that a preference for larger over smaller

companies to work for was positively correlated not only with MAS but
also with UAI. In the organizational literature large companies are often
supposed to be less innovative than small ones, unless they reward intrapre-
neurs who dare to break rules. This term is a pun on the word entrepreneurs,
the independent self-starters who, according to the Austrian-American
economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), are the main source of innova-
tion in a society.
Schumpeter’s ideas played a role in a research project in which Geert
took part, together with a number of Dutch colleagues. The project looked
for economic and cultural factors affecting levels of self-employment in