Page 55 - Cultures and Organizations

40 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

U.S. psychologists Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae developed
a self-scored personality test based on the Big Five, the Revised NEO
Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). By the end of the century, it had been
translated from American English into a number of other languages and
used on samples of the same kind of people in many countries.
In a joint article, McCrae and Hofstede explored the relationship
between personality dimension scores and national culture dimension

scores. Mean scores on the five NEO-PI-R dimensions for comparative

samples from thirty-three countries correlated significantly with all four
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IBM culture dimensions. We will meet some of these correlations in the
following chapters. Our joint study showed that culture and personality
are not independent. Refer again to Figure 1.1: while there is a wide range
of different personalities within every country, the way these individuals
describe themselves in personality tests is partly influenced by the national

culture of the country.
The association between personality and culture, however, is statisti-
cal, not absolute. It does not justify the use of national culture scores as
stereotypes for individuals from these nations. The range of personalities
within each country is far too wide for that. National culture scores are not
about individuals, but about national societies.

Other Classifications of National Cultures
The basic innovation of Culture’s Consequences, when it appeared in 1980,
was classifying national cultures along a number of dimensions. As we
argued at the beginning of this chapter, this represented a new paradigm
in the study of culture—that is, a radically new approach. A paradigm is
not a theory, but one step before a theory: a way of thinking that leads to
developing theories. New paradigms invariably lead to controversy, as they

reverse cherished truths but also open new perspectives. Since Culture’s
Consequences, several other theories of national cultures have used the same
paradigm, each suggesting its own way of classifying them.
An elaborate and widely known application of the dimensions para-
digm was by the Israeli psychologist Shalom H. Schwartz. From a sur-
vey of the literature, he selected a list of fifty-six value items. A major

inspiration for his list was the work of the American psychologist Milton
Rokeach (1973), who compared different groups in the American popula-
tion on eighteen “terminal values” (nouns describing desirable end states,