What is Culture?
Culture is one of the most infamous words to define; the idea of culture encircles a range of topics, differences, processes, and paradoxes. Culture is not something that is inherited, but rather a code of attitudes, standards, and values that is learned along the way within a social environment. Culture is witnessed on three levels. Attitudes such as language, eating, contracts, architecture, and rituals are observed, standards are rules as to the way things are at a cultural level, and values are related to preferences as to how things should be, such as what is good or bad.
As the world moves towards globalization, organisations are diagnosing a need to establish business operations in other countries and management needs to realise that different cultures produce different behaviors, beliefs and values; essentially what works in one country may not work in another.
- Management can be broken down into four different functions:
- planning which deals with defining goals and establishing strategy
- organising which deals with defining which tasks need to be done and who does them
- leading deals with motivating staff and resolving conflicts
- controlling deals with the monitoring of activities to ensure they get completed as per the plan
But how do we measure culture?
Perhaps the most inclusive studies on how culture affects values in the workplace was conducted by Geert Hofstede, who analysed employee value data collected from over sixty countries and developed a series of dimensions that would come to be known as the Hofstede dimensions on national culture. Hofstede’s dimensions are:
- Power distance: the distance between individuals in a hierarchy and their attitude to authority
- Uncertainty avoidance: the amount an individual can accept uncertainty or insecurity.
- Individual versus group orientation: whether an individual is concerned more with their needs or the needs of the collective.
- Masculine versus feminine: the significance of work goals compared to family goals.
- Short terms versus long term orientation: the degree in which an individual focuses on the long term rather than satisfying short term goals.
Hofstede’s dimensions on an individual country is meaningless, the dimensions are relative and can only be used as a vehicle to compare countries against another. The dimensions measure the tendency within a cultural grouping and do not reflect an individual in a specific circumstance, in saying that, Hofstede’s research is known internationally and this theory often applied in multi and cross cultural research.
Hofstede’s conclusions has been confirmed by the Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness research programme (GLOBE), who through establishing a form of order that allows cultures to be grouped as a cluster by similarities such as religion, language, ethnicity, and geography.
