The Utility of Hofstede’s Cultural Values in the Workplace

Researchers have adopted Hofstede’s framework of cultural values, altogether or partially by way of using two to three values on a particular purpose in their research. This section looks through cultural studies that used Hofstede’s values, other than IND, with regard to the workplace relationship like employee commitment, leadership and negotiations at individual as well as organizational level. The review especially tries to show significance of three cultural values of this study in relation to the workplace relationship.

Brett and Okumura (1998) confirmed that joint gains are lower in intercultural negotiations between U.S and Japanese negotiators than in intra-cultural negotiations among either U.S or Japanese negotiators. This finding was based on data from 30

intercultural, 47 U.S-U.S intra-cultural and 18 Japanese-Japanese intra-cultural simulated negotiations in a series of inter- and intra-cultural dyad experiments. They found that US negotiators were more individualistic yet lower in PD than Japanese. Individualists endorsed self-interest in negotiations whereas Japanese negotiators higher in PD endorsed distributive tactics and spent more time discussing power. But they did not attempt to compare the importance of these differences in PD.

Helgstrand and Stuhlmacher (1999) validated Hofstede’s PD and IND constructs through a survey completed by 263 Australian bank employees representing 28 different nationalities. Each participant was assigned a country score for PD and IND-COL and divided into high and low groups on the two values. Collectivists had more informal contact with coworkers, and were more cooperative than individualists. The respondents who were high in PD had more contact with superiors described their supervision as being more direct and close, more task-oriented and had greater beliefs in management style favoring centralized decision making, tight control and hierarchy. In contrast, those low in PD were less open with their superiors.

As regards the relationship between Hofstede’s values and employee commitment, there are certain studies such as Clugston, Howell, and Dorfman (2000) Kirkman and Shapiro (2001). Clugston et al. (2000) assessed the relationships between PD, COL, UA and MAS and an employee’s level of commitment with three bases (affective, continuance and normative) and three foci (organization, supervisor and workgroup) using surveys in a US public agency. PD was positively related to affective commitment to the organization and both continuance and normative commitment were positively related to all 3 foci. UA was related to continuance commitment across all foci; and COL was related to workgroup commitment across all bases of commitment. By using surveys from self-managing work team members in Finland, US, Philippines and Belgium, Kirkman and Shapiro (2001) found that COL was related to team members’ job satisfaction and commitment. It was also found

that resistance to teams mediated the relationships between COL and both satisfaction and commitment while resistance to self-management partially mediated the negative relationship between PD and commitment.

Regarding cultural values in leadership studies, Offermann and Hellmann (1997) examined relationships between cultural values held by over 400 managers representing 39 different nationalities and their leadership practices as assessed by subordinates. Their findings show that PD was negatively related to leader communication, approachability, delegation and team building, and UA was positively associated with more leader control but negatively to approachability and delegation. COL was positively related to team-oriented leadership, and PD and UA were negatively related to participative leadership in a sample of middle managers from countries (House et al., 1999). In examining the existence of culture specific leadership attributes, Javidan and Carl (2005) found a charismatic leader whose attributions are sacrifice, forgoing own interest and elevating subordinates self-esteem, self-confidence (Bennis & Nanus, 1985) and those attributions imply PD, i.e., regarding subordinates as equal rather than seeing as a inferior (Hofstede, 1980).

Mikalauskienė and Štreimikienė (2012) investigated the impact of national culture dimensions on organizational culture dimensions through a comparative analysis. Using the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and comparing the survey results with Taiwan’s, Mexic’s and Lithuania’s respective Hofstede’s culture dimension scores, they found that PD is positively related to involvement, but negatively related to the traits of consistency, adaptability and mission. MAS is positively connected to involvement, but negatively to other traits. LTO is positively associated to the organizational traits involvement and consistency, but negatively related to adaptability and mission. Mission, Adaptability,

Involvement and Consistency are organizational culture dimensions developed by Denison (1990).

From here, the review scrutinized previous research that has some similarity with the

first research question of this study and encountered one study by Barkema and Vermeulen (1997), whose study gave attempt in determining which cultural value difference is most disruptive relative to the other cultural value differences for international joint ventures.

Their findings disclosed that long-term orientation has a stronger effect on survival of international joint ventures than that of the other dimensions. Even though they found long-term orientation as most disruptive towards survival of international joint ventures, it seems illogical to assume that long-term orientation will also have most disruptive impact on people of any country because culture is defined as shared values that have been studied on two purposes: 1) to facilitate external adaptation of an organization and 2) to facilitate internal integration of an organization (Schein, 2010; Schneider, 1989). External adaption is how an organization relates to a new context (country with different culture) with the awareness of threats and opportunities in it. Obviously, their research was about the outside issues of an organization and was not really about interpersonal relationship within organization. Thus, which cultural value difference is most disruptive for people of a particular nation remains unanswered.

As far as the cultural-value related studies are reviewed here, there is no study that attempts to compare cultural values against each other at interpersonal level. Perhaps this is due to importance of other fields such as management, marketing, consumer behaviors that may have occupied researchers’ attention more. Therefore, the question postulated here in this work needs to be answered for the sake of cooperation and development between the two countries as well as for its contribution to cultural-value related literature. In the following section, the two nationalities observed main differences are shown and are compared to shed some light on their unseen cultural value differences.