FRED BAILEY: AN INNOCENT ABROAD

Fred Bailey: An Innocent Abroad- A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Management

Fred Bailey: An Innocent Abroad- A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Management

Hofstede's Dimension of Culture & the MBI Framework

Culture has been defined in many ways; this author's shorthand definition is: "Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others". It is always a collective phenomenon, but it can be connected to different collectives. Within each collective there is a variety of individuals. If characteristics of individuals are imagined as varying according to some bell curve; the variation between cultures is the shift of the bell curve when one moves from one society to the other. Most commonly the term culture is used for tribes or ethnic groups (in anthropology), for nations (in political science, sociology and management), and for organizations (in sociology and management). A relatively unexplored field is the culture of occupations (for instance, of engineers versus accountants, or of academics from different disciplines). The term can also be applied to the genders, to generations, or to social classes. However, changing the level of aggregation studied changes the nature of the concept of 'culture'. Societal, national and gender cultures, which children acquire from their earliest youth onwards, are much deeper rooted in the human mind than occupational cultures acquired at university, or than organizational cultures acquired on the job. The latter are exchangeable when people take a new job. Societal cultures reside in (often unconscious) values, in the sense of broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others (Hofstede, 2001:5). Organizational cultures reside rather in (visible and conscious) practices: the way people perceive what goes on in their organizational environment.

Many studies further explored the dimension of individualism and collectivism (e.g. Kim et al., 1994; Triandis, 1995; Hofstede, 2001:Chapter 5). From all the Hofstede dimensions, this one met with the most positive reactions among psychologists, especially in the U.S.A. which happened to be the highest scoring country on it. Ind/Col scores were strongly correlated with national wealth which led some people to the conclusion that promoting individualism in other cultures would contribute to their economic development. In fact, data show that the causality is most probably reversed: wealth tends to lead to individualism (Hofstede, 2001:253). The individualism in U.S. culture also led people to studying it at the individual level (comparing one person to another), not at the level of societies. In this case it is no longer a dimension of culture but possibly a dimension of personality. Also there is no more reason why individualism and collectivism need to be opposite; they should rather be considered separate aspects of personality. An extensive review of studies of individualism at the individual level was published by Oyserman, Coon and Kemmelmeier (2002). Comparing these studies across societies they found a different ranking of countries from the Hofstede studies; but Schimmack, Oishi and Diener (2005) proved this was due to a methodological error: Oyserman et ...