Page 402 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 367

3. Ambition, or personal need for achievement (for example, wanting to
contribute to the success of the organization and wanting opportuni-
ties for advancement).
4. Machismo, or personal masculinity (for example, parents should
stimulate children to be best in class, and when a man’s career
demands it, the family should make sacrifi ces).
5. Orderliness; employees who had more orderly minds saw the organi-
zation as more orderly.
6. Authoritarianism (for example, it is undesirable that management
authority can be questioned). Authoritarianism was stronger for
employees who were less educated and female.

Systematic individual differences in perceptions of organizational cultures
are most likely based on personality. In fact, five of the dimensions listed

here resemble the Big Five dimensions of personality described in Chapter
2 (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness,
and neuroticism). The individual perceptions dimensions can be associated
with Big Five dimensions as follows: 26

1. Alienation with neuroticism
2. Workaholism with extraversion (which includes active and energetic)
3. Ambition with openness to experience
4. Machismo negatively with agreeableness
5. Orderliness with conscientiousness

No personality factor was available for an association with authoritari-
anism, which surprised us. In Chapter 2 we described how Geert and Big
Five author Robert R. McCrae found mean personality scores for compara-
tive samples from thirty-three countries to correlate significantly with all

27
four IBM culture dimensions, but not with long-term orientation. Geert
wondered whether this could be explained from the fact that both clas-
sifications were conceived by Western minds. Could the Big Five model

miss out on a personality dimension that across countries might relate to
long- versus short-term orientation?
There is research evidence suggesting that the Big Five personality
28
measure, developed in the West, may be incomplete in Asia. Findings
from China and the Philippines yielded a sixth personality factor: inter-
personal relatedness, or gregariousness. Our organizational culture study