Page 81 - Cultures and Organizations

More Equal than Others 63

together under the influence of the same global forces, the scores remain
valid.
Bond’s Chinese Value Survey study among students in twenty-three
countries, described in Chapter 2, produced a moral discipline dimension on
which the countries positioned themselves largely in the same way as they
had done in the IBM studies on power distance (in statistical terms, moral
discipline was significantly correlated with PDI). Students in countries
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scoring high on power distance answered that the following were particu-
larly important:

■ Having few desires
■ Moderation, following the middle way
■ Keeping oneself disinterested and pure

In unequal societies, ordinary people such as students felt they should not
have aspirations beyond their rank.
Students in countries scoring low on power distance, on the other
hand, answered that the following were particularly important:

■ Adaptability
■ Prudence (carefulness)

In more egalitarian societies, where problems cannot be resolved by some-
one’s show of power, students stressed the importance of being fl exible in
order to get somewhere.
The GLOBE study, also described in Chapter 2, included items
intended to measure a power distance dimension. As we argued, GLOBE’s
questions were formulated very differently from ours. Rather than the
respondents’ daily terminology, they used researchers’ jargon, making it

often difficult for the respondents to guess what the answers meant. From

GLOBE’s eighteen dimensions (nine asking respondents to describe their
culture “as it is” and nine “as it should be”), no fewer than nine were sig-
nifi cantly correlated with our PDI. The strongest correlation of PDI was
with the GLOBE dimension in-group collectivism “as is.” There was only a

weakly significant correlation between PDI and GLOBE’s power distance
“as is,” and there was none at all between PDI and GLOBE’s power distance
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“should be.” In fact, GLOBE’s power distance “as is” and “should be” both
correlated more strongly with our uncertainty avoidance index (Chapter
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6). GLOBE’s power distance presents no alternative for our PDI.