How are Cultures Described in Dimensional Models?

The study of cross-cultural analysis incorporates the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communication. The combination of cross-cultural analysis and business is a new and evolving field; it’s not a static understanding but changes as the world changes. Within cross-cultural analysis, two names dominate the dominant understanding culture in the Canadian business context—Geert Hofstede and Edward T. Hall.

This section will review both the thinkers and the main components of how they define culture and the impact on communications and business. At first glance, it may seem irrelevant to daily business management to learn about these approaches. In reality, despite the evolution of cultures, these methods provide a comprehensive and enduring understanding of the key factors that shape a culture, which in turn impact every aspect of doing business globally. Additionally, these methods enable us to compare and contrast cultures more objectively. By understanding these theories, you’ll be able to consider how these dimensional approaches to culture can contribute to your own understanding and relationships.

Hofstede and Values

Geert Hofstede, sometimes called the father of modern cross-cultural thinking, is a social psychologist who focused on a comparison of nations using a statistical analysis of two unique databases. The first and largest database composed of answers that matched employee samples from forty different countries to the same survey questions focused on attitudes and beliefs. The second consisted of answers to some of the same questions by Hofstede’s executive students who came from fifteen countries and from a variety of companies and industries. He developed a framework for understanding the systematic differences between nations in these two databases. This framework focused on value dimensions. Values, in this case, are broad preferences for one state of affairs over others, and they are mostly unconscious.

Most of us understand that values are our own culture’s or society’s ideas about what is good, bad, acceptable, or unacceptable. Hofstede developed a framework for understanding how these values underlie organizational behaviour. Through his database research, he identified five key value dimensions that analyze and interpret the behaviours, values, and attitudes of a national culture

1. Power distance
2. Individualism
3. Motivation towards Achievement and Success
4. Uncertainty avoidance (UA)
5. Long-term orientation (Hofstede et al., 2010; The Culture Factor Group, 2024)

Power distance refers to how openly a society or culture accepts or does not accept differences between people, as in hierarchies in the workplace, in politics, and so on. For example, high power distance cultures openly accept that a boss is “higher” and as such deserves a more formal respect and authority. Examples of these cultures include Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. In Japan or Mexico, the senior person is almost a father figure and is automatically given respect and usually loyalty without questions.

In Southern Europe, Latin America, and much of Asia, power is an integral part of the social equation. People tend to accept relationships where status differences are evident. An individual’s status, age, and seniority command respect—they’re what make it all right for the lower-ranked person to take orders. Subordinates expect to be told what to do and likely won’t take initiative or speak their minds unless a manager explicitly asks for their opinion.

At the other end of the spectrum are low power distance cultures, in which leaders and subordinates are more likely to see each other as equal in power. Countries found at this end of the spectrum include Austria and Denmark. To be sure, not all cultures view power in the same ways. In Sweden, Norway, and Israel, for example, respect for equality is a warranty of freedom. Subordinates and managers alike often have freedom to speak their minds.Interestingly enough, research indicates that the United States tilts toward low power distance but is more in the middle of the scale than Germany and the United Kingdom.

Individualism is just what it sounds like. It refers to people’s tendency to take care of themselves and their immediate circle of family and friends, perhaps at the expense of the overall society. In individualistic cultures, what counts most is self-realization. Initiating alone, sweating alone, achieving alone—not necessarily collective efforts—are what win applause. In individualistic cultures, competition is the fuel of success.

The United States and Northern European societies are often labeled as individualistic. In the United States, individualism is valued and promoted—from its political structure (individual rights and democracy) to entrepreneurial zeal (capitalism). Other examples of high-individualism cultures include Canada and the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, in collectivist societies, group goals take precedence over individuals’ goals. Basically, individual members render loyalty to the group, and the group takes care of its individual members. Rather than giving priority to “me,” the “us” identity predominates. Of paramount importance is pursuing the common goals, beliefs, and values of the group as a whole—so much so, in some cases, that it may be difficult for outsiders to enter the group. Cultures that prize collectivism and the group over the individual include Singapore, Korea, Mexico, and Arab nations. The protections offered by traditional Japanese companies come to mind as a distinctively group-oriented value.

The next dimension is motivation to achievement and success. This dimension was previously known as “masculinity”; however, this language has now been changed in a way that reflects that this dimension is not about gender. Rather, it concerns a contrast between values like independence and assertiveness (traditionally perceived as “masculine” in Hofstede’s framework) and values like a focus on relationships and quality of life.

Cultures with a higher orientation towards motivation and success tend to focus on the following values: assertiveness, materialism, and less concern for others. In higher success-orientation cultures, gender roles are usually crisply defined. Men tend to be more focused on performance, ambition, and material success. They cut tough and independent personas, while women cultivate modesty and quality of life. Cultures in Japan and Latin American are examples of these cultures.

In contrast, cultures with lower motivation to achievement and success focus on these values: concern for all, an emphasis on the quality of life, and an emphasis on relationships. In these cultures, both genders swap roles, with the focus on quality of life, service, and independence. The Scandinavian cultures rank as having lower motivation to achievement, as do cultures in Switzerland and New Zealand. Canada is actually more moderate, and its score is ranked as a moderate orientation to achievement and success. For all these factors, it’s important to remember that cultures don’t necessarily fall neatly into one camp or the other.

The next dimension is uncertainty avoidance (UA). This refers to how much uncertainty a society or culture is willing to accept. It can also be considered an indication of the risk propensity of people from a specific culture. People who have high uncertainty avoidance generally prefer to steer clear of conflict and competition. They tend to appreciate very clear instructions. At the office, sharply defined rules and rituals are used to get tasks completed. Stability and what is known are preferred to instability and the unknown. Company cultures in these countries may show a preference for low-risk decisions, and employees in these companies are less willing to exhibit aggressiveness. Japan and France are often considered clear examples of such societies.

In countries with low uncertainty avoidance, people are more willing to take on risks, companies may appear less formal and structured, and “thinking outside the box” is valued. Examples of these cultures are Denmark, Singapore, Australia, and to a slightly lesser extent, Canada. Members of these cultures usually require less formal rules to interact.

The fifth dimension is long-term orientation, which refers to whether a culture has a long-term or short-term orientation. This dimension was added by Hofstede after the original four you just read about. It resulted in the effort to understand the difference in thinking between dominant ways of thinking in Eastern Societies, and dominant ways of thinking in Western contexts. Certain values are associated with each orientation. The long-term orientation values persistence, perseverance, thriftiness, and having a sense of shame. These are evident in traditional Eastern cultures. Based on these values, it’s easy to see why a Japanese CEO is likely to apologize or take the blame for a faulty product or process.

The short-term orientation values tradition only to the extent of fulfilling social obligations or providing gifts or favours. These cultures are more likely to be focused on the immediate or short-term impact of an issue. Not surprisingly, the Canada and the United States rank low on the long-term orientation.

Long- and short-term orientation and the other value dimensions in the business arena are all evolving as many people earn business degrees and gain experience outside their home cultures and countries, thereby diluting the significance of a single cultural perspective. As a result, in practice, these five dimensions do not occur as single values but are really woven together and interdependent, creating very complex cultural interactions. Even though these five values are constantly shifting and not static, they help us begin to understand how and why people from different cultures may think and act as they do.

Hofstede’s study demonstrates that there may be national and regional cultural groupings that affect the behaviour of societies and organizations and that these can be persistent over time.

Edward T. Hall

Edward T. Hall was an anthropologist who applied his field to the understanding of cultures and intercultural communications. Hall is best noted for three principal categories that analyze and interpret how communications and interactions between cultures differ: context, space, and time (Hall, 1976).

Context: High-Context versus Low-Context Cultures

High and low context refers to how a message is communicated. In high-context cultures, such as many cultures in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the physical context of the message carries a great deal of importance. People tend to be more indirect and to expect the person they are communicating with to decode the implicit part of their message. While the person sending the message takes painstaking care in crafting the message, the person receiving the message is expected to read it within context. The message may lack the verbal directness you would expect in a low-context culture. In high-context cultures, body language is as important and sometimes more important than the actual words spoken.

In contrast, in low-context cultures such as the United States and most Northern European countries, people tend to be explicit and direct in their communications. Satisfying individual needs is important. You’re may be familiar with some well-known low-context mottos: “Say what you mean” and “Don’t beat around the bush”- in other words, come straight to the point. The guiding principle is to minimize the margins of misunderstanding or doubt. Low-context communication aspires to get straight to the point.

Communication between people from high-context and low-context cultures can be confusing. In business interactions, people from low-context cultures tend to listen only to the words spoken; they tend not to be cognizant of body language. As a result, people often miss important clues that could tell them more about the specific issue.

Space

Space refers to the study of physical space and people. Hall called this the study of proxemics, which focuses on space and distance between people as they interact. Space refers to everything from how close people stand to one another to how people might mark their territory or boundaries in the workplace and in other settings. Stand too close to someone from the United States, which prefers a “safe” physical distance, and you are apt to make them uncomfortable. How close is too close depends on where you are from. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we all establish a comfort zone when interacting with others. Standing distances shrink and expand across cultures. Many people from Latin America and many Filipinos (whose culture has been influenced by three centuries of Spanish colonization) stand rather close even in business encounters. In cultures that have a low need for territory, people not only tend to stand closer together but also are more willing to share their space—whether it be a workplace, an office, a seat on a train, or even ownership of a business project.

Attitudes toward Time: Polychronic versus Monochronic Cultures

Hall identified that time is another important concept greatly influenced by culture. In polychronic cultures—polychronic literally means “many times”—people can do several things at the same time. In monochronic cultures, or “one-time” cultures, people tend to do one task at a time.

This isn’t to suggest that people in polychronic cultures are better at multitasking. Rather, people in monochronic cultures, such as Northern Europe and North America, tend to schedule one event at a time. For them, an appointment that starts at 8 a.m. is an appointment that starts at 8 a.m.—or 8:05 at the latest. People are expected to arrive on time, whether for a board meeting or a family picnic. Time is a means of imposing order. Often the meeting has a firm end time as well, and even if the agenda is not finished, it’s not unusual to end the meeting and finish the agenda at another scheduled meeting.

In polychronic cultures, by contrast, time is nice, but people and relationships matter more. Finishing a task may also matter more. If you’ve ever been to Latin America, the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, you know all about living with relaxed timetables. People might attend to three things at once and think nothing of it. Or they may cluster informally, rather than arrange themselves in a queue. In polychronic cultures, it’s not considered an insult to walk into a meeting or a party well past the appointed hour.

In polychronic cultures, people regard work as part of a larger interaction with a community. If an agenda is not complete, people in polychronic cultures are less likely to simply end the meeting and are more likely to continue to finish the business at hand.

Those who prefer monochronic order may find polychronic order frustrating and hard to manage effectively. Those raised with a polychronic sensibility, on the other hand, might resent the “tyranny of the clock” and prefer to be focused on completing the tasks at hand.

Critiques of Hofstede and National Culture

It is important to recognize that the idea of cultural dimensions is strongly grounded in the idea of national cultures. In other words, when we review materials based on Hofstede’s model, we find that the typically contrast values and practices that would be characteristic of groups of people from the same country. These models assume that our national identity plays a major role in the cultural characteristics that we tend to embody and practice. At one level, there is likely some truth to this assumption, and to a certain degree there are values and behaviours common to those with similar countries of origin.

However, there are also problems with this model. For example, McSweeney (2002) critiques five potential problems in the way that Hofstede conducted the research he used as a basis of the model. McSweeny names five possible problems. First, Hofstede incorrectly assumes that IBM employees carried exactly three non-interacting cultures (organizational, occupational, and national), ignoring the possibility of multiple overlapping cultural influences. Second, Hofstede makes an unjustified leap by claiming that data from a small, non-representative sample of IBM employees (sometimes as few as 37 respondents in a country) can represent entire national cultures. Third, McSweeney challenges Hofstede’s assumption that questionnaire response differences were caused by national culture rather than other factors, pointing out that any classification of data would produce differences that Hofstede simply labeled as “national culture.” Fourth, McSweeney questions whether the limited survey questions could comprehensively capture something as complex as culture, noting that different researchers using different questions have produced very different results. Finally, McSweeney criticizes Hofstede’s assumption that workplace-based findings apply to all contexts within a nation, when people may behave differently in different situations. Beyond these methodological issues, McSweeney argues that Hofstede’s model treats nations as culturally uniform despite substantial within-nation diversity, attributes too much causal power to national culture while ignoring other influences, presents cultures as unchanging despite historical evidence to the contrary, and often uses circular reasoning to explain national differences.

Cultural Essentialism and Alternatives to National Culture

The second problem with dimensional ways of understanding culture concerns the possibility of stereotyping and cultural essentialism. Cultural essentialism is the belief that fixed cultural characteristics and ways of being emerge from a person’s national or ethnic origin (Holliday, 1999). This perspective categorizes people within a culture or those from other cultures according to supposedly inherent, unchanging qualities. Cultural essentialists assert that people are passive bearers of their culture, with their attitudes, beliefs, and achievements reflecting typical cultural patterns that permanently define them.

This essentialist view has historical roots in colonial power structures. Cultural essentialism originates from a colonial mindset, where colonizers used power to label those they considered to be “Other.” Through this process, colonizers tended to describe the cultures of those they colonized as “lesser than”, and in ways we would view today as disrespectful. An important consideration in understanding cultural representation is recognizing that cultural descriptions are often written by those with more cultural power about those with less cultural power (Holliday, 2010). This power imbalance raises the critical question: Who gets to describe your culture?

In contrast to essentialism, Homi Bhabha’s (1994/ 2004)concept of cultural hybridity offers a more nuanced understanding of cultural identity. According to Bhabha, an individual’s cultural identit(ies) shift in response to their experiences and choices about how they represent themselves. Hybridity challenges the notion of fixed and pure cultures by highlighting the continuous exchange and interaction among cultures.

This hybrid perspective recognizes that individuals navigate multiple between multiple cultural groups simultaneously and engage in ongoing processes of cultural negotiation and transformation. Rather than viewing culture as something static that people passively carry, hybridity acknowledges the agency individuals have in constructing their cultural identities through interaction with diverse cultural influences. In other words, our own cultural self-understanding shifts as we have new intercultural experiences. The experience of immigration (whether first or second-generation) can create powerful and meaningful shifts in identity, resulting in hybridized self-understandings. Living for long periods of time in other cultures can also motivate these shifts.

Complementing Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, Holliday’s (1999) theory of small cultures provides another framework for understanding cultural identity beyond essentialist categories. According to Holliday, patterns of behavior and thinking arise from our experience in smaller cultural groups; we can have more than one “small culture” (e.g., team cultures, professional cultures, family cultures). This perspective shifts focus away from national or ethnic determinism toward recognizing the multiple cultural influences that shape individual identity and behavior.

Unlike essentialist approaches that might attribute certain behaviors exclusively to national culture (as in some interpretations of Hofstede’s work), the small cultures approach acknowledges that individuals participate in and are influenced by numerous cultural contexts simultaneously. This creates a more complex and accurate picture of cultural identity that respects individual agency and recognizes the fluid, contextual nature of cultural expression.

Together, the concepts of cultural hybridity and small cultures offer powerful alternatives to cultural essentialism. They encourage us to move beyond simplistic categorizations based on national or ethnic origin and instead recognize the complex, dynamic processes through which cultural identities are formed and transformed. By acknowledging the “in-between” spaces where cultures interact and the multiple cultural affiliations that shape individual experience, we can develop more nuanced approaches to intercultural understanding that respect both cultural difference and individual agency.

Chapter References

Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The location of culture. Routledge.

Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture (Anchor Books ed). Anchor Books.

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition (Third). McGraw-Hill. https://go.exlibris.link/n65xCyfN

Holliday, A. (1999). Small cultures. Applied Linguistics, 20(2), 237–264. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/20.2.237

McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith—A failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55(1), 89–118. ProQuest Central. https://ezproxy.kpu.ca:2443/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/231516132?accountid=35875

The Culture Factor Group. (2024). Global report 2024: A cultural guide to management—Understanding employee needs and expectations. The Culture Factor Group. https://www.theculturefactor.com/resources/report/global-report-2024

Attribution Statement:  Some content in this chapter is adapted from Carpenter, M. A., & Dunung, S. P. (2012). International business. Saylor Foundation. https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/72. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA