Instructions As an international manager, your effectiveness can be greatly influenced by your understanding of cultural differences and their impact on staff. Hofstede’s Model of National Culture and

Instructions As an international manager, your effectiveness can be greatly influenced by your understanding of cultural differences and their impact on staff. Hofstede’s Model of National Culture and
HOFSTEDE’S MODEL OF NATIONAL CULTURE. Let’s look at the first way that we can classify country cultures in order to determine how to train managers to successfully work with employees in that culture—Hofstede’s model of national culture. SHRM C:3 Individual Versus Group Behavior Geert Hofstede is a trained psychologist who was hired in the 1960s by IBM (at the time, one of the few really global companies in the world with about 100,000 employees in more than 70 countries) to help them identify cultural differences within countries in which they operated.44 His data allowed him to develop a model of national culture that is still widely used today. He originally identified five dimensions—each of which allows a country culture to be plotted along a continuum. He later added another dimension, but we will stick with the original five, since that is the model that most people know about. Each dimension was measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest exhibition of that dimension. (More countries were added to Hofstede’s model in later years, resulting in some scores moving above 100.) Let’s look at the dimensions of the model in Exhibit 16-2.45 These cultural dimensions continue to be studied.46 WORKAPPLICATION 16-4 Give an example of cultural diversity you have encountered, preferably at work. After reading through the exhibit, you are probably saying to yourself, “So what?” What is the value in knowing that Russian culture is oriented toward the short term, Japan is highly masculine, and India is moderately collectivist? The value in the model is in knowing how significant the differences are between two countries’ cultures. The greater the difference in the two cultures on each of the dimensions, the more difficult it is to bring employees from one culture into the other. For instance, if you compare China and the United States, you will find that China has high power-distance, low individualism, and a fairly low level of uncertainty avoidance and is long-term oriented.47 The United States is moderately low in power-distance and very high in individualism, has a moderate level of uncertainty avoidance, and is reasonably short-term oriented. This means that a manager coming from China to run a facility in the United States is going have some difficulty adjusting to the culture (unless they have previously been exposed to it) without significant culture-adaptation training by the organization. Similarly, putting employees from these two cultures together to accomplish any task is likely to fail unless they are given cultural training before working together. The HR department is typically charged with cross-cultural training of employees who will be working outside their native culture. (On a side note: If you ever get bored and want to watch a pretty good movie about extreme culture clash, watch a film from the 1980s called Gung-Ho with Michael Keaton. You will quickly see why cultural differences matter in business.) p.584 Exhibit 16-2  HOFSTEDE’S MODEL OF NATIONAL CULTURE Sources: The Hofstede Centre; home.sandiego.edu/~dimon/CulturalFrameworks.pdf. GLOBE. As Hofstede’s research became dated, Project GLOBE confirmed his dimensions are still valid today and extended and expanded his five original dimensions into nine. The project includes hundreds of companies and includes more countries. GLOBE stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness, and it is an ongoing cross-cultural investigation of leadership and national culture. The GLOBE research team uses data from hundreds of organizations in more than 62 countries to identify nine dimensions in which national cultures are diverse. See Exhibit 16-3 for a list of the dimensions with examples of country ratings.48 Notice that some of the GLOBE dimensions have the same or similar names as Hofstede’s five dimensions. As shown, through cross-cultural comparisons, there are differences,49 especially between Eastern and Western cultures.50 p.585 GLOBAL STAFFING LO 16-3 Briefly discuss the Big Five personality traits in relation to international assignments and the advantages and disadvantages of parent-country, host-country, and third-country nationals for international assignments As you can see, operating a business on a global scale requires some complex sets of skills. How are we going to staff the organization with people who have both the ability and the desire to work in this type of environment? We will need to recruit people with a specific set of skills. We will also have to make some choices about what types of employees we are going to recruit and from which countries. Then we will have to determine what training is necessary for them to be successful. These choices by the HR manager can determine the success or failure of our global organization. Exhibit 16-3  GLOBE DIMENSIONS Source: Adapted from M. Javidon and R. J. House, “Cultural acumen for the global manager: Lessons from Project GLOBE,” Organizational Dynamics, 29 (2001), 289–305.