Page 59 - Cultures and Organizations

44 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

and nonmanagers) from forty-three countries, they found two independent
dimensions, one correlated with our individualism-collectivism dimension
and the other primarily with our power distance dimension and secondar-
27
ily again with individualism-collectivism. Trompenaars’s questionnaire
did not cover other aspects of national cultures.

A Second Expansion of the Hofstede
Dimensional Model: Minkov’s Exploration
of the World Values Survey

In the early 1980s departments of divinity at six European universities,
concerned with a loss of Christian faith, jointly surveyed the values of their
countries’ populations through public-opinion survey methods. In the fol-
lowing years their “European Values Survey” expanded and changed focus:
led by U.S. sociologist Ronald Inglehart, it grew into a periodic World
Values Survey (WVS). Subsequent data-collection rounds took place in
ten-year intervals; as of this writing, a fourth round is in process. The
survey now covers more than one hundred countries worldwide with a
questionnaire including more than 360 forced-choice items.Areas covered
are ecology, economy, education, emotions, family, gender and sexuality,
government and politics, happiness, health, leisure and friends, morality,
religion, society and nation, and work. The entire WVS data bank, includ-
ing previous rounds and down to the individual respondent scores, is freely
accessible on the Web. 28
Along with the WVS, many other rich value data sources have become
accessible to anyone who has the courage to search the Web, including
the European Social Survey and the Economic and Social Survey of Asia
and the Pacifi c. When Geert started his values research in the 1970s, the

IBM employee survey data comprised the largest cross-national collection
of comparative value statements anywhere in the world. If he had to start
again now, he would do it from the World Values Survey.
WVS coordinator Ronald Inglehart, in an initial analysis of his data-
base, announced two main factors, which he called well-being versus survival
and secular-rational versus traditional authority. As the following chapters will
show, both correlate with our dimension scores. However, it was evident from
the start that the enormous data mine of the WVS hid more treasures.
The challenge was taken up by Misho Minkov. In a courageous expe-
dition into the WVS jungle—and adding recent data from other relevant