Page 52 - Cultures and Organizations

Studying Cultural Differences 37

Extending the IBM Model:
The Chinese Value Survey

In late 1980, just after Culture’s Consequences had been published, Geert
met Michael Harris Bond, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Bond and a number of his colleagues from the Asia-Pacific region had

just finished a comparison of the values of female and male psychology
students from each of ten national or ethnic groups in their region. They
11
had used an adapted version of the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS), devel-
oped by U.S. psychologist Milton Rokeach on the basis of an inventory of
values in U.S. society around 1970. When Bond analyzed the RVS data in
the same way that Geert had analyzed the IBM data, he also found four
meaningful dimensions. Across the six countries that were part of both

studies, each RVS dimension was significantly correlated with one of the
IBM dimensions. 12
The discovery of similar dimensions in completely different material
represented strong support for the basic nature of what was found. With
another questionnaire, using other respondents (students instead of IBM
employees), at another point in time (data collected around 1979 instead
of 1970) and in a restricted group of countries, four similar dimensions
emerged. Both Michael and Geert were not just pleased but also puzzled.
The survey results themselves demonstrated that people’s ways of thinking
are culturally constrained. As the researchers were human, they were also
children of their cultures; both the IBM questionnaire and the RVS were
products of Western minds. In both cases, respondents in non-Western
countries had answered Western questions. To what extent had this cir-
cumstance been responsible for the correlation between the results of the
two studies? To what extent had irrelevant questions been asked and rel-
evant questions been omitted?

Michael Bond, a Canadian having lived and worked in the Far East
since 1971, found a creative solution to the Western bias problem. He asked
a number of his Chinese colleagues from Hong Kong and Taiwan to help
him compose a list of basic values for Chinese people. The new question-
naire was called the Chinese Value Survey (CVS). It was administered in

translation to one hundred students, fifty men and fifty women, in each of

twenty-three countries around the world. A statistical analysis of the CVS
results yielded again four dimensions. Across twenty overlapping coun-