Page 341 - Cultures and Organizations

306 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

so that there were insufficient data from this group. A discussion of Ste-
vens’s models with Indian and Indonesian colleagues led to the suggestion
that the equivalent implicit model of an organization in these countries
is the (extended) “family,” in which the owner-manager is the almighty
(grand)father. It corresponds to large power distance but weak uncertainty

avoidance, a situation in which people would resolve the conflict we pic-
tured by permanent referral to the boss: concentration of authority without
structuring of activities. Anant Negandhi and S. Benjamin Prasad, two
Americans originally from India, quoted a senior Indian executive with a
Ph.D. from a prestigious American university:

What is most important for me and my department is not what I do or
achieve for the company, but whether the Master’s favor is bestowed on me.
. . . This I have achieved by saying “yes” to everything the Master says or
does. . . . To contradict him is to look for another job. . . . I left my freedom
of thought in Boston. 2

More recently, psychologist Jan Pieter van Oudenhoven, of Holland,
collected spontaneous descriptions of local organizations from more than
3
seven hundred business administration students in ten countries. The stu-
dents were asked to describe a company they knew well in a number of
freely chosen adjectives. The seven hundred stories were content analyzed,
and the adjectives used were combined into opposing pairs. One pair was
bureaucratic versus nonbureaucratic, and the frequency of “bureaucratic”
correlated with the countries’ power distance and uncertainty avoidance.
Another pair was teamwork versus individual work, and the frequency of
“individual work” correlated with individualism. A third was friendly versus
hostile work ambiance, and the frequency of “hostile work ambiance” corre-
4

lated with masculinity. So, the way these students described organizations
in their respective countries reflected aspects of their national culture.

A network of political scientists coordinated by Poul Erik Mouritzen,
of Denmark, and James Svara, of the United States, studied local govern-
ment administration in more than four thousand municipalities covering
fourteen Western democracies. Among other things, they collected scores
on national cultures, through survey answers by the top civil servant in
each municipal administration. Their study is one of the larger replications
of the IBM survey (see Table 2.1). They distinguished four ways in which