Page 58 - Cultures and Organizations

Studying Cultural Differences 43

taken, the massive body of GLOBE data still reflected the structure of the
original Hofstede model.
A complication in the comparison of GLOBE’s conclusions with ours is
that the GLOBE report often uses the same terms we used but with quite
different meanings. This is evident in the names of the dimensions; owing
to the entirely different way of formulating the questions, GLOBE dimen-
sions with the names “power distance” and “uncertainty avoidance” cannot
even be expected to measure the same things as the Hofstede dimensions.
We will show this in Chapters 3 through 7. Further, GLOBE uses the terms
practices for answers about culture “as it is” and values for answers about
culture “as it should be.” In Figure 1.2, as previously discussed, we used
“practices” for symbols, heroes, and rituals visible to the outside observer,
and we used “values” for what a respondent prefers for him- or herself, often
unconsciously. Finally, GLOBE assumed that questions starting with “In

this society” would reflect national culture and that the same questions
starting with “In this organization” would yield organizational culture.
GLOBE reports that in practice both types of answers were virtually the
same, so the two sets of data were later combined. Geert and colleagues,
in a large research project focusing solely on organizational cultures, to be
introduced at the end of this chapter and extensively described in Chapter
10, found that organizational and national culture are very different phe-
nomena and cannot even be measured with the same questions.
An author sometimes cited as having researched dimensions of natio-
nal culture is the Dutch management consultant Fons Trompenaars. He
distinguishes seven dimensions: universalism versus particularism, individu-
alism versus collectivism, affectivity versus neutrality, specifi city versus diffuse-
ness, achievement versus ascription, time orientation, and relation to nature. 24
However, these are not based on empirical research but rather are borrowed
from conceptual distinctions made by American sociologists in the 1950s

and 1960s, not specifi cally for describing countries. Trompenaars col-
25
lected a database of survey items, also found in American mid-twentieth-
26
century sociology literature, among his audiences and business contacts
in a number of countries; on the Web he claimed it contained data from
fi fty-fi ve thousand “managers.” Unfortunately, Trompenaars has no peer-
reviewed academic publications, and he nowhere specifies what exactly

his database contains; it is unclear what it contributes to his conceptual
distinctions. The only peer-reviewed statistical analysis of Trompenaars’s
data so far was done in the 1990s by British psychologists Peter Smith and
Shaun Dugan. In the scores of some nine thousand respondents (managers