Page 271 - Cultures and Organizations

244 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

tacts and a stress on keeping one’s commitments. These were the values at
the positive pole of LTO-CVS.
The values at the negative pole of LTO-CVS are not mentioned in the
Qing story. No reference is made to protecting one’s face; even if there is in
fact a lot of face-saving going on in East Asia, the LTO-CVS scores show
that at the conscious level, the student respondents wanted to de-emphasize
it. No reference is made to respect for tradition; part of the secret of the
Dragons’ economic success is the ease with which these countries have
accepted Western technological innovations.
Adaptiveness was described by one of Confucius’s disciples as follows:

The superior man goes through his life without any one preconceived action
or any taboo. He merely decides for the moment what is the right thing
to do.” 16

Sixty senior business leaders from the five Dragons plus Thailand and
an equivalent group in the United States were asked to rank seventeen
possible work values. The top seven values selected by the Asians were
hard work, respect for learning, honesty, openness to new ideas, account-
ability, self-discipline, and self-reliance. The Americans selected freedom
of expression, personal freedom, self-reliance, individual rights, hard work,
17
personal achievement, and thinking for oneself. This fi nding confi rms
both the LTO differences (hard work, learning, openness, accountability,
self-discipline) and the IDV differences (freedoms, rights, thinking for one-
self) between East Asia and the United States. In successive rounds of the
WVS, the relative importance in one’s life of leisure time compared with
family, work, friends, religion, and politics was consistently negatively cor-
related with LTO-CVS. 18
Investing in building up strong market positions, at the expense

of immediate results, is supposed to be a characteristic of Asian, high-
LTO companies. Managers (often family members) are allowed time and
resources to make their own contribution. In cultures that are short-term
oriented, the “bottom line” (the results of the past month, quarter, or year)
is a major concern; control systems are focusing on it, and managers are
constantly judged by it. This state of affairs is supported by arguments
assumed to be rational, but this rationality rests on cultural—that is, pre-
rational—choices. The cost of short-term decisions in terms of “pecuniary
considerations, myopic decisions, work process control, hasty adoption and