Page 57 - Cultures and Organizations

42 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

term orientation became future orientation. It added two more dimensions,
also inspired by our masculinity-femininity distinction: humane orientation
and performance orientation. The nine dimensions were covered by seventy-
eight survey questions, half of them asking respondents to describe their
culture (“as it is”) and the other half asking them to judge it (“as it should
be”). GLOBE thus produced 9 2 18 culture scores for each country:
nine “as is” dimensions and nine “as should be” dimensions. Also, GLOBE
used two versions of the questionnaire: half of the respondents were asked
about the culture “in this society” and the other half about the culture “in
this organization.”
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In an evaluation of the GLOBE project, Geert criticized GLOBE
for having formulated the questions in researchers’ jargon, not refl ective

of the problems on the responding (mainly first-line) managers’ minds.
GLOBE asked for the respondents’ descriptions and evaluations of their
fellow citizens’ traits and behaviors, as well as for generalized descriptions
and evaluations of their country’s cultures. This method yields meaningful
results only when the issue is simple, such as family relations. For more
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abstract issues, it is difficult to know what the answers mean. An example

is the following GLOBE item: “In this society, most people lead highly
structured lives with few unexpected events.” How are managers supposed
to answer such a question, which even expert social scientists would fi nd
diffi cult?
GLOBE’s “as is” questions are supposed to be descriptive, but many of
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them just produce national (character) stereotypes. GLOBE’s “as should
be” questions, in terms of the distinction made earlier in this chapter, deal
with the desirable. Unlike in the Hofstede research, none of the GLOBE
questions deals with the personally desired.
Across countries, some GLOBE dimensions were strongly correlated

among each other; “as is” and “as should be” dimensions often correlated
negatively. In a reanalysis, Geert found that the eighteen dimensions on
the basis of their country scores sorted themselves into fi ve clusters. The
strongest, grouping seven GLOBE dimensions, was highly signifi cantly
correlated with national wealth, and next with the Hofstede power distance,
individualism, and uncertainty avoidance dimensions, in this order. Three

more clusters were each significantly correlated with only one Hofstede
dimension: respectively, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-
term orientation dimensions. The GLOBE questionnaire contained very
few items covering masculinity in the Hofstede sense, but whatever there

was belonged to the fifth cluster. In spite of the very different approach