Page 84 - Cultures and Organizations

66 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

The next question is whether the differences in power distance between
occupations were equally strong within all countries. In order to test this,
a comparison was done of four occupations of widely different status, from
each of eleven country subsidiaries of widely different power distance lev-
els. It turned out that the occupation differences were largest in the coun-
tries with the lowest PDI scores and were relatively small in the countries
16
with high PDI scores. In other words, if the country as a whole scored
larger power distance in Table 3.1, this applied to all employees, those in
high-status occupations as well as those in low-status occupations. If the
country scored smaller power distance, this applied most to the employ-
ees of middle or higher status: the lower-status, lower-educated employ-
ees produced power distance scores nearly as high as their colleagues in
the large-PDI countries. The values of high-status employees with regard
to inequality seem to depend strongly on nationality; those of low-status
employees much less. 17
The fact that less-educated, low-status employees in various Western
countries hold more “authoritarian” values than their higher-status com-
patriots had already been described by sociologists. These authoritarian
values not only are manifested at work but also are found in their home
situations. A study in the United States and Italy in the 1960s showed that
working-class parents demanded more obedience from their children than
middle-class parents but that the difference was larger in the United States
than in Italy. 18

Measures Associated with Power Distance: The
Structure in This and Following Chapters

In the next part of this chapter, the differences in power distance scores

for countries will be associated with differences in family, school, work-
place, state, and ideas prevailing within the countries. Chapters 4 through
8, which deal with the other dimensions, will also be mostly structured
in this way. Most of the associations described are based on the results of
statistical analyses, in which the country scores have been correlated with
the results of other quantitative studies, in the way described in Chapter
2. In addition, use has been made of qualitative information about families,
schools, workplaces, and so on, in various countries. In this book the sta-