HOFSTEDE'S CULTURAL DIMENSIONS

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions

Introduction

Culture is the characteristics of people within a group, their behavior, beliefs and all the common things between them. It is the culture people relate to within a society and contribute and share common values with them. That is why culture includes many societal aspects as well, such as rules, values, customs, norms, tools, products, institutes and organizations. An institute refers to cultural values and rules associated with social activities. Family, religion, work, education and health care are the common institutions found within a society. Culture varies from institutes to institutes, organizations to organizations and countries to countries. This is due to the change in lifestyle, thinking process, shared values, norms, religion, rules of different societies. People from one part of the world will show different behavior towards a particular situation than those living far away from them.  The study of culture and how and why societies act in a certain manner was undertaken by Mr. Hofstede in theory of dimensions. The theory describes how the culture affects its members, their values and how these relate with each other. This theory studies the cross cultural differences between societies. It helps when people from one society moves to another and learn the differences among two (Hofstede & Bond, 1988, 4-21). In our case we have taken help from Hofstede theory of dimension to learn how culture will impact a person from Romania as he shifts to U.K for business purposes.

 

Hofstede's Dimension

The Hofstede theory of cultural dimension originally introduced four dimensions with the help of which cultural values can be analyzed: Power distance; individual collectivism; masculinity avoidance and uncertainty avoidance. An independent research conduct in Hong Kong made Hofstede add another dimension to the theory known as long term orientation.  The world has become a global village and we are living in a global age. Advancement in technology has shrieked the world as we are much closer to each other. This means that people from different societies and cultures find themselves working together and communicating more with each other. This can be both frustrating and interesting at the same time, since relating with a person from another culture is not an easy task. How do one start a conversation, are there any don'ts and taboos to avoid while conversing to a person from another society and culture, such are  the questions one should always be vary of. There are many issues within an organization like structuring projects, motivating people and developing strategy which becomes even more difficult with people from around the world working in that organization.  The questions arises that, are there any guidelines from which we can discover how to adjust to such environment or we just observe and learn from our mistakes. Dr. Geert Hofstede came up with this cultural dimension on which he scored each country on the scale of 0 to 100. More the score of a society, higher it exhibits that dimension within that society.

 

Five Dimension

Dr. Hofstede conducted his research on employees of IBM and learned ...