Page 54 - Cultures and Organizations

Studying Cultural Differences 39

other measures; in one out of six cases, we need two dimensions, and in one
14

out of fifty, we need three. A striking fact of the various validations is that
correlations do not tend to become weaker over time. The IBM national
dimension scores (or at least their relative positions) have remained as valid
in the year 2010 as they were around 1970, indicating that they describe
relatively enduring aspects of these countries’ societies.

Culture Scores and Personality Scores:
No Reason for Stereotyping

American social anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century

saw a close relationship between cultures and the personalities of the people
in them. What we now call national culture was then called national char-
acter or modal personality; American pioneer anthropologist Ruth Benedict
saw human cultures as “personality writ large.” 15
A criticism of this viewpoint was that it led to the stereotyping of indi-

viduals. Stereotypes are literally printing plates; figuratively they are con-
ventional notions that are usually associated uncritically with a person on
the basis of his or her background. The accusation of stereotyping indi-
viduals has sometimes also been raised against the national culture dimen-
sions paradigm.
The relationship between national culture and personality received
new attention at the end of the twentieth century, due to the availability of
better data. On the culture side, these came from our values research; on
the personality side, from developments in personality testing. In a per-
sonality test an individual answers a number of questions about him- or
herself. In the mid-twentieth century there used to be a confusing variety
of competing personality tests, but in the 1990s a consensus was grow-

ing that a useful common denominator of most personality tests in most

countries is a set of five dimensions of personality variation (the so-called
Big Five):

O: Openness to experience versus rigidity
C: Conscientiousness versus undependability

E: Extraversion versus introversion

A: Agreeableness versus ill-temperedness
N: Neuroticism versus emotional stability