Page 403 - Cultures and Organizations

368 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

located in Europe, meanwhile, missed a personality factor related to
authoritarianism.
Gregariousness and authoritarianism may be interpreted as two facets
of a common sixth personality factor, dealing with dependence on others.
Across countries, this might very well correlate with long-term orienta-
tion. Extending the Big Five to a Big Six may increase its cross-cultural
universality. 29

Gardens, Bouquets, and Flowers of
Social Science

The choice of a level of analysis, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, has fi g-
ured prominently in the present chapter. When we compared the same kind
of data across countries, across organizational units, and across individu-
als, we found three different sets of dimensions, belonging to three differ-
ent social science disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
The cross-national study of the IBM data took what were fi rst sup-
posed to be psychological data and aggregated them to the country level.
At that level they melted into concepts describing societies, such as collec-
tivism versus individualism, which really belong to anthropology and/or
to political science. The database of the IRIC organizational culture study,
analyzed at the level of organizational units, produced basic distinctions
from organizational sociology, like Merton’s local versus cosmopolitan.
The same database, analyzed at the level of individual differences from the
organizational unit’s mean, supported the results of personality research
in individual psychology.
Societies, organizations, and individuals represent the gardens, bou-

quets, and flowers of social science. Our research has shown that the three

are related and part of the same social reality. If we want to understand

our social environment, we cannot fence ourselves into the confines of one
level only: we should be prepared to count with all three. 30

Occupational Cultures

In Figure 10.1 an occupational culture level was placed halfway between

nation and organization, because entering an occupational field means the
acquisition of both values and practices; the place of socialization is the