Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
comparative
cross cultural
culture
HRM
methodology
Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
1470-5958 [200104]1:1;91108;017284
CCM International Journal of
Cross Cultural
Management 2001 Vol 1(1): 91108
03_CCM articles 1(1) 15/3/01 3:03 pm Page 91
ingly burgeoning. Researchers from different
parts of the world and different cultural
backgrounds have scrutinized these aspects
from various angles: economic, political,
managerial, organizational, sociological,
philosophical, and . . . cultural.
The culture-focused studies have in
recent years increasingly concentrated on
interface activities of firms such as negotia-
tions, advertising and customer/client rela-
tionships, and internal activities such as
human resource management and industrial
relations. This article addresses some of the
major obstacles that such studies face, and
the attempts that have been made to over-
come some of these. It is not intended to be
prescriptive and offer solutions, but to stimu-
late debate and discussion on the way ahead.
The issues and problems that the present
article focuses on fall within six categories:
(1) dimensionalization of national culture,
(2) treatment of non-cultural factors in cross
cultural studies, (3) disentanglement of
national culture from organizational culture,
(4) parity of meaning of concepts across
cultural boundaries, with special emphasis on
HRM, (5) research tools, and (6) researchers
cultural bias.
Cultural Dimensions
Culture, however defined (Chapman, 1992,
1997), applies of course to various levels of
society: national, industry, corporation,
department/function, a class of university
students attending an international business
course in their final year. In fact, any two or
more people who engage in and sustain a
relationship over a length of time would
develop their own culture with its own
unique recognizable features. The focus of
the present article is national culture, here-
after referred to simply as culture.
Culture is a woolly concept, almost
impossible to observe and measure all its
visible and hidden corners; like the air that
we breathe, we cannot see or weigh it, we
cannot put our arms around it and feel its
strength and power, but we know it is there.
Many researchers, certainly those who work
within a positivist paradigm, have attempted
to measure it. To do that, one obvious course
of action would be to break culture down
into what are thought to be its components,
or dimensions. Within the management and
organization discipline, researchers started
noting cultures presence and effects as far
back as the mid-1960s (Crozier, 1964; Haire
et al., 1966), but we owe its dimensionaliza-
tion, certainly in the comparative cross
cultural field, to Hofstedes seminal study
conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
which culminated in his book Cultures
Consequences, published in 1980. Others fol-
lowed, almost all unquestioningly, replicating
and using these dimensions to measure and
compare various cultures, sometimes modify-
ing or adding to them along the way.
Hofstedes original study, a by-product of
two in-house attitude questionnaire surveys
in subsidiaries of an American multinational
company, proposed four cultural dimensions,
each placed on a continuum ranging from
high to low, along which nations could be
also placed. Some had a smaller value of any
given dimension, others a larger one. These
by now well known dimensions are: power
distance, uncertainty avoidance, individual-
ism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity.
Together with a colleague, Hofstede
(Hofstede and Bond, 1984, 1988) identified a
fifth dimension, a result of two questionnaire
surveys among a sample of students from 10
and 23 countries respectively. This dimen-
sion, first termed Confucian dynamism and
then renamed as time orientation, is argued
to embrace two contrasting poles and dis-
tinguish short-term oriented cultures from
the long-term oriented ones.
Some of these five dimensions were later
refined (Schwartz and Bilsky, 1987, 1990)
and elaborated further (Trompenaars, 1993;
Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, 1994;
Triandis, 1995).
International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 1(1) 92
03_CCM articles 1(1) 15/3/01 3:03 pm Page 92
Triandis (1990, 1995) developed a theory
of individualism and collectivism that can be
used both at cultural and individual or psy-
chological levels. Fiske (1990, 1992) identi-
fied four universal patterns of social behav-
iour called communal sharing, equality
matching, market pricing, and authority
ranking that can be used to explain simi-
larities and differences in cultures. Schwartz
and colleague (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz
and Bilsky, 1987, 1990) presented a theory of
universal structure of value that can be used
to cluster cultures into different groups and
explain their similarities and differences.
Trompenaars (1993) cultural model con-
sists of seven dimensions, five of which are
grouped under relationships with people,
the other two are concerned with time and
environment:
attitudes to time;