Geert Hofstede

Management within a society is very much constrained by its cultural

context, because it is impossible to co-ordinate the actions of people without a
deep understanding of their values, beliefs and expressions.
Geert Hofstede
Dutch psychologist
Born 1928

Breakthrough ideas
Cultural management
Key book
Cultures Consequences
The Ultimate Business Guru Book 100

According to The Economist, Geert Hofstede (born 1928) more or less invented
[cultural diversity] as a management A subject. Few would deny that this is the
case. The Dutch academic has exerted considerable influence over thinking on the
human and cultural implications of globalization. Indeed, in the social science
citation index reviewing 1400 journals, Hofstede was one of the most cited thinkers,
ahead of such luminaries as Kant, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Mill and Keynes.
In Hofstedes hands, culture becomes the crux of business. He defines it as the
collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group
or category of people from another. Hofstede describes its power in almost lyrical
terms: Culture consists of the patterns of thinking that parents transfer to their
children, teachers to their students, friends to their friends, leaders to their followers,
and followers to their leaders. Culture is reflected in the meanings people attach to
various aspects of life; their ways of looking at the world and their role in it; their
values-that is, in what they consider as good and as evil; their collective beliefs
what they consider as true and as false; their artistic expressions what they
consider as beautiful and ugly. Culture, although basically resident in peoples
minds, becomes crystallized in the institutions and tangible products of a society,
which reinforce the mental programs in their turn.
Hofstedes conclusions are based on huge amounts of research. His seminal work
on cross-cultural management, Cultures Consequences, involved over 100,000
surveys from over 60 countries. Fons Trompenaars, who follows in Hofstedes
footsteps as a Dutch cultural expert, adopts a similarly obsessive approach to
questionnaires. The sheer size of Hofstedes research base leads to perennial
questions about how manageable and useful it can be.
One of the fruits of Hofstedes research into national values and practices was
his five-dimensional model. Hofstede concluded that there was a structure in to
cultural differences between countries. Each society faces some similar problems,
but solutions differ from one society to another. Hofstede identified five basic
characteristics that distinguish national cultures. These dimensions are:
Geert Hofstede 101
Power distance the extent to which the less powerful members of
institutions and organizations expect and accept that power is unequally
distributed.
Individualism in some societies the ties between individuals are loose while
in others there is greater collectivism and strong cohesive groups. According
to Hofstedes measurements, the US scores 91 out of 100 for individualism.
At the other end of the scale, Guatemala scores six.
Masculinity how distinct are social gender roles?
Uncertainty avoidance the extent to which society members feel threatened
by uncertain or unknown situations.
Long-term orientation the extent to which a society exhibits a pragmatic
future-oriented perspective.
Hofstede was greatly influenced by his wartime experiences in occupied Holland.
He trained as a mechanical engineer and wrote his doctoral thesis on The game of
budget control. Along the way he metamorphosed from an engineer into a
psychologist and completed a PhD in social psychology. He spent time working in
factories as a foreman and plant manager; was chief psychologist on the
international staff of IBM; and joined IMEDE, the Swiss business school in 1971.
He has also worked at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management
in Brussels and at the University of Limburg in Maastricht where he is now
Emeritus Professor of Organizational Anthropology and International Management.
He is founding director of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Co-operation at
the University of Limburg.