Page 56 - Cultures and Organizations

Studying Cultural Differences 41

such as equality) and eighteen “instrumental values” (adjectives describing
ways to get there, such as honest). Respondents were asked to score the
extent to which each item is important as “a guiding principle in your life,”
on a nine-point scale from 1 “opposed to values” and 0 “not impor-
tant” to 7 “supreme importance.” In terms of the distinction cited in the
section on measuring values earlier in this chapter, Schwartz’s value items
are closer to the desirable than to the desired. 17
Through a network of colleagues, Schwartz collected scores from sam-
ples of college students and elementary school teachers in more than sixty
18
countries. He initially compared individuals and, through a statistical
procedure (smallest space analysis), divided his values into ten dimensions.
As with Geert before him, Schwartz went through a learning experience
when he moved his analysis to the country level: contrary to his initial
expectations, he found that at this level he needed a different set of dimen-
sions. His seven country-level dimensions were labeled conservatism, hierar-
chy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarian commitment,

and harmony. There are significant correlations between Schwartz’s coun-
try scores and our scores, but mainly with individualism/collectivism; one
reason may be that Schwartz’s country scores do not control for national
wealth (see Chapter 4). 19
Another large-scale application of the dimensions paradigm is the
GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness)
project, conceived by U.S. management scholar Robert J. House in 1991.
At first House focused on leadership, but soon the study branched out

into other aspects of national and organizational cultures. In the period
1994– 97 some 170 voluntary collaborators collected data from about sev-
enteen thousand managers in nearly one thousand local (nonmultinational)
organizations belonging to one of three industries—food processing,

financial services, and telecommunication services—in some sixty societies

throughout the world. In the preface to the book describing the project, 20
House writes, “We have a very adequate data set to replicate Hofstede’s
(1980) landmark study and extend that study to test hypotheses relevant
to relationships among societal-level variables, organizational practices,
and leader attributes and behavior.”

For conceptual reasons GLOBE expanded the five Hofstede dimensions
to nine. It maintained the labels power distance and uncertainty avoidance. It
split collectivism into institutional collectivism and in-group collectivism, and
masculinity-femininity into assertiveness and gender egalitarianism. Long-