MGMT1003 Chap.11 National Culture and the Hofstede Dimensions
National Culture and the Hofstede Dimensions
Culture you cannot see
Week 6 opens with competent managers abroad who broke rules nobody had written down.
Culture is shared, learned and largely invisible, like an iceberg whose assumptions sit below the waterline, and you belong to several cultures at once.
Hofstede's six dimensions
From IBM survey data collected between 1967 and 1973, Hofstede derived dimensions such as power distance, individualism and uncertainty avoidance.
Each changes something concrete at work, from whether bad news reaches the manager to which lever changes behaviour.
How this chapter is examined
Expect recognition items on the six dimensions, the years they were added and the power distance scores, and applied items describing a manager misreading a team abroad.
Strong answers name the most relevant dimension, show how it explains the facts, offer a concrete change to how meetings or feedback run, and add the caution that a national score describes a population, not the person.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why cross-cultural management matters
- 02
Culture defined and the iceberg model
- 03
Six layers of culture and three rival explanations
- 04
Hofstede's IBM study and the six dimensions
- 05
Power distance at work
- 06
Individualism, collectivism and perceived norms
- 07
Uncertainty avoidance and the later dimensions
Worked example · free
Compare Australian and South Korean power distance scores
- 1South Korea's 60 against Australia's 36 to 38 suggests greater acceptance of unequal power: less open disagreement with the boss and bad news travelling upward late or softened.
- 1The manager should therefore build private or written routes for problems and avoid reading public agreement as consent.
- 1The scores are country averages, so they cannot predict any one team member; using them that way is the ecological fallacy.
Key terms
- Cross-Cultural Management
- Learning to work well with people from other cultural settings by changing how you communicate, decide and lead.
- Culture
- A mental programming held in common by a group that sets it apart from others: shared, learned and mostly unseen.
- Individualism
- Hofstede's dimension in which people are expected to put themselves and their close family ahead of wider groups.
- Uncertainty Avoidance
- How threatened a society feels by ambiguous or unknown situations and how many rules it builds against them.
- Power Distance
- Hofstede's dimension for how far the less powerful in a society accept that power is shared out unequally.
National Culture and the Hofstede Dimensions FAQ
What did Hofstede's original study measure?
More than 88,000 IBM staff in 72 countries completed over 116,000 surveys collected between 1967 and 1973. Holding the employer constant let him argue that country differences reflected national culture. Four dimensions appeared in 1980, long-term orientation in 1991 and indulgence versus restraint in 2010.
Why does power distance matter so much to a manager?
It changes whether people disagree with the boss openly, whether decisions follow consultation, how seniors are addressed and, most expensively, whether bad news reaches the manager quickly. In higher power distance settings bad news can arrive late, softened or not at all.
How do individualism and collectivism change what motivates behaviour?
In more individualist settings, personal attitudes best predict behaviour, so make the personal case. In more collectivist settings, perceived norms predict it better, so show what colleagues actually do. Eom and colleagues found this pattern across 47 countries and in a direct United States and Japan comparison.
What does uncertainty avoidance change for a manager?
Where it is high, ambiguity feels threatening, so vague briefs cause stress and delay, change meets resistance, and a failed experiment can harm a career. Managers in such settings should explain the process, sequence and safeguards of a change, not just the vision, and treat resistance as information rather than obstruction.
Exam move
Learn the six dimensions with one workplace consequence each, the iceberg's two halves and the six layers of culture. Memorise the power distance scores with their sources, and practise giving cultural, personality and situational explanations for the same behaviour.
Finish by choosing one behaviour that surprised you in a classmate and writing a cultural, a personality and a situational explanation, then the question you would ask to test them.
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