Citation
(2013), "Dr Kristine Marin Kawamura interviews Geert Hofstede, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCM-07-2013-0111
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Dr Kristine Marin Kawamura interviews Geert Hofstede, PhD
Article Type: Scholars Corner From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 4
Background
Dr Geert Hofstede is a renowned scholar and social scientist, a prolific writer, and a seminal thought leader in the study of culture. Integrating the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, he has been a pioneer in mapping the diversity of human cultures. Dr Hofstede is world renowned for identifying the cultural dimensions along which nations vary in terms of values, and identifying the dimensions of organizational culture that are based upon organizational practices.
Dr Hofstede has published more than 230 articles and book chapters and numerous books on culture and the areas of organization, management, and the future of work. His best-known book is Cultures Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (first published in 1980, updated in 2001). Further evolution of his thinking is reflected in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991, with updates in 2005 and 2010). Dr Hofstedes works, in total, have been cited in English more than 84,000 times. His work has inspired hundreds of scholars in such vastly different research areas as international business and cross-cultural management, innovation, personality, values and beliefs, cultural distance, marketing, and medicine. It has also served as the impetus for the research by Professor Shalom Schwartz and for the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Project.
Dr Hofstede has received many honors around the world for his work in culture. He is a Fellow with the Academy of Management (USA) and an Honorary Fellow of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, and has been named Eminent Scholar by the Academy of International Business. He is an Honorary Member of SIETAR Europa and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Section of Economics and Law (2010) and an International Honorary Member of AIESEC. He has been named to the Reputation Institutes Hall of Fame (May 2009) and was listed in The Wall Street Journals ranking of the top 20 most influential management thinkers (5 May 2008).
Dr Hofstede has received honorary doctorates from the following institutions: Nyenrode Business Universiteit, The Netherlands; Nov Bulgarski Universitet, Sofia, Bulgaria; Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; Göteborgs Universitet, Gothenburg, Sweden; Université de Liège, Belgium; ISM University of Management and Economics, Vilnius, Lithuania; University of Pécs, Hungary; and University of Tartu, Estonia, 2012. He has also received honorary professorships from Hong Kong University (1992-2000), the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing, and Renmin University of China, Beijing.
The University of Groningen and the Hanzehogeschool (now named Hanze University of Applied Sciences) jointly established a biannual Geert Hofstede Lecture in the area of intercultural communication in The Netherlands (2004) while Maastricht University inaugurated a Geert Hofstede Chair on Cultural Diversity (2006).
A group of European schools jointly teaching international communication has named itself the Geert Hofstede Consortium (2009). Members include: the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands; IULM (International University of Languages and Communication), Milan, Italy; Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; Nov Bulgarski Universitet; and Vilnius University, Lithuania. Dr Hofstede was knighted by order of Her Majesty, Beatrix, Queen of The Netherlands, to the rank of Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw (September 2011). He also received the Life Achievement Award der deutschen Weiterbildungsbranche at the Petersberger Trainertage in Köngswinter (March 2012).
Dr Hofstede received his PhD in social psychology in 1967 at Groningen University.
Interview date: 8 April 2013
Summary
Dr Hofstede, a pioneer in the study of culture who integrates the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, highlights the motivation for his work on culture. He provides several definitions of culture, positioning it against personality and human nature. Dr Hofstede discerns between national culture and organizational culture, with national culture giving rise to the development of human values, and organizational culture consisting of firms practices regarding the symbols, heroes, and rituals that are visible to the outside observer. He discounts the notions of national management and leadership cultures, asserting that leaders and managers are all part of national societies, and that if we want to understand their behavior, we must understand those societies and the “mental software – the culture – within which they operate. Dr Hofstede describes seven deadly sins that impact social scientists when they conduct cross-cultural research in a multicultural world. Reviewing a 1998 study on the goals of business leaders in 17 countries, Dr Hofstede builds the connection between individual goals and national cultures, shows how this studys results surprisingly predicted the latest recession, and calls for a new economic order that is built upon respect for the interests of society rather than the goal of growth.
Dr Kawamura: You are a pioneer in the study of national cultural differences, and your groundbreaking scholarship and practice have greatly influenced and inspired work in numerous fields, including cross-cultural management, organizational behavior, global leadership, and even marketing and medicine. What has motivated your work? What has been the most surprising impact of your work?
Dr Hofstede: What motivated me was old-fashioned curiosity about the social world I lived in, worked in, blundered in, and observed people and things in. My greatest surprise was that so many others were interested in my observations and found them useful and helpful.
Dr Kawamura: Many researchers have found it difficult to define culture. How do you define it?
Dr Hofstede: This can be most simply defined as: “La culture, cest ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié (Édouard Herrio) – translated “Culture is what is left when you have forgotten all else. You can also say that culture is not in your mind, it is in your gut.
If you think of this more deeply, every person has to find his or her place in many different moral circles, or groups, in their lives. Each group carries a set of common mental programs that constitutes its culture. We therefore carry many different levels of mental programs that correspond to different levels of culture, all at the same time. We have a national level of culture, or cultures, depending on our migration choices. We have a regional and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or linguistic culture. We also have a gender level of culture and a generational-level one (which separates grandparents from children and from grandchildren). We have a social-class level of culture that comes from differences in educational opportunities and professions or occupations. For people working in organizations, we also have different types of organizational cultures that arise from how employees have been socialized by their work or organizations. These different mental programs may conflict, making it difficult for a person to know how to behave in a new situation. For example, religious values may conflict with generational values; gender values may conflict with organizational practices.
Dr Kawamura: Given the six dimensions of national culture you have defined and studied – power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, short- versus long-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint – which dimension(s) has been the most well-studied by other researchers? Which has been the most under-studied?
Dr Hofstede: This depends on the nationality and discipline of the researcher. Americans focus on individualism and the Dutch focus on femininity. Organizational sociologists tend to study power distance and uncertainty avoidance while Asians focus on long-term orientation. The study of indulgence is too new to be able to tell yet.
Dr Kawamura: What are the origins of the newest dimension, indulgence versus restraint?
Dr Hofstede: The long- versus short-term orientation dimension was originally found with a questionnaire conceived from Chinese concepts. My friend Michael Minkov succeeded in reproducing it from the World Values Survey data, but in the process he found indulgence versus restraint as an independent companion dimension. It enabled us to explain aspects we had never been able to cover, like feelings of happiness, and behaviors we had noticed but not understood, such as peoples choice between order and freedom of expression.
Dr Kawamura: What is the relationship, or interaction, between national culture and organizational culture?
Dr Hofstede: We studied this question in depth in the book I co-authored in 2010 with Gert Jan Hofstede and Michael Minkov, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. It is based on research conducted in more than 70 countries over a 40-year span. We look at how culture – the place where we grew up – shapes the way we think, feel, and act. In part of this book, we look at how organizational cultures differ from national cultures and how they can be managed.
First of all, the use of the word culture for both nations and organizations suggests that they are identical phenomena. This is not correct. They are two different types of culture, with the difference based on their varied mix of values and practices.
Culture at a national, or societal, level consists of the unwritten rules of the game. It is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others. This mental programming, or software of the mind, comes from the social environment in which one grows up and collects life experiences, including the family, the neighborhood, school, youth groups, and the living community. It is here, in the first ten years of life, that people obtain most of their values, which can be defined as the broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others.
Dr Kawamura: How, then, do we develop values?
Dr Hofstede: We learn values by absorbing how people around us behave, in early childhood and on through the teenage years. Because people acquire values so early in life, they are often unconscious of them. They cannot be directly observed by outsiders and can only be inferred by the way people act in certain circumstances. If one asks people why they do what they do, they often say they just “know or “feel how to do the right thing.
Dr Kawamura: And, how would you define organizational cultures?
Dr Hofstede: An organizational culture, on the other hand, is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one organization from others. It is a social system that its members usually did not grow up in. We acquire organizational cultures when we enter workplaces as adults, with our values already firmly in place. Organizational cultures consist of the firms practices – or to be more explicit, the shared perceptions of daily practices. Effective shared practices are the reason multinational corporations can function at all. Because firms typically employ personnel from a variety of nationalities, they cannot assume everyone shares common values. Managers have to coordinate and control their operations through worldwide practices that are inspired by their own national origin but can be learned by employees from a variety of countries.
Dr Kawamura: How, then, do values get established in an organization?
Dr Hofstede: The way values enter an organization is through the hiring process – they do not arise from membership in the firm itself. A company may hire people of a certain nationality, gender, age, or education. Their subsequent socialization in the organization comes through learning the practices associated with the firms symbols, heroes, and rituals.
Dr Kawamura: So the study of national cultures and organizational cultures requires the use of different lenses and different measures of culture?
Dr Hofstede: Yes. Values, more than practices, are the stable element in national culture, so comparative research on cultures starts from the measurement of values. I studied national cultures – national value systems – from a survey data base of IBM employees working in subsidiaries in more than 50 countries around the world. From one country to another, the people represented almost perfectly matched sample sets; they were similar in all respects other than nationality – which made the effects of their national differences, or cultural values, really stand out. I found considerable differences in values among national cultures in four dimensions: power distance, collectivism versus individualism, femininity versus masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance. The details of the study can be found in many of my papers and books.
We studied organizational culture in a project conducted between 1985 and 1987 under the sponsorship of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC). The IRIC study was cross-organizational and complemented the cross-national IBM studies. We covered roughly 20 units representing ten different organizations in Denmark and The Netherlands.
These two countries scored fairly similarly on the IBM national culture dimensions, so within this national context, IRIC wanted to access a wide range of work organizations.
Dr Kawamura: What was the research process used in the IRIC study?
Dr Hofstede: We started with a qualitative phase consisting of in-depth, person-to-person interviews of two to three hours duration each. These interviews gave us the qualitative feel – the gestalt – of the units culture and a collection of issues about the organizational symbols, heroes, rituals, and values that would be included in the survey questionnaire. We then implemented a second, quantitative phase of the project that consisted of a paper-and-pencil survey with precoded questions, administered to a random sample from the unit. We discussed the results of both the interviews and surveys with the units management.
Dr Kawamura: And what were the results?
Dr Hofstede: We found that the 20 units differed only slightly with respect to the members cultural values, but they varied considerably in their practices. Ultimately, the study found six dimensions of organizational cultures:
1. process oriented versus results oriented;
2. employee oriented versus job oriented;
3. parochial versus professional;
4. open system versus closed system;
5. loose versus tight control; and
6. normative versus pragmatic.
Whats also interesting about the findings of this study is that they contrasted to those espoused by Peters and Waterman in their book, In Search of Excellence. The authors asserted that shared values represented the core of a corporate culture. The IRIC project, on the other hand, showed that shared perceptions of daily practices should be considered the core of a companys culture and that employees values differed more according to their gender, age, and education (and of course, their nationality) than according to their membership in the organization.
Dr Kawamura: Why do you think you found such opposite results in terms of values?
Dr Hofstede: The difference was in the targeted subject of the studies. In Search of Excellence, Peters and Waterman describe the values of corporate heroes – the founders and significant leaders. In the IRIC study, the researchers surveyed the “ordinary members of the firms who were supposed to carry the culture. I agree that the values of founders and key leaders shape organizational cultures, but the way in which these cultures affect ordinary members is through shared practices. What happens is that the values of the founders and leaders become the practices of the members.
Dr Kawamura: Lots of business schools and management literature, incidentally, refer to national management cultures or leadership cultures. What do you think of this?
Dr Hofstede: Managers and leaders, and the people they work with, are all part of national societies. If we want to understand leadership and management behavior, we must understand their societies and the culture – the mental software – within which they operate. This requires asking questions about their patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting; the systems in which they live and work; and the ordinary and menial things in life. We need to learn about their countries literature, arts, and sciences as well as the political and educational systems and historical events their generation has experienced. It is also important to examine how families function, children are raised, and consumers behave, and we need to know their beliefs about topics ranging from health and sickness and religion to crime and punishment.
Dr Kawamura: How can organizational culture best be studied and measured?
Dr Hofstede: It is best studied in two phases. Primarily, the researcher begins with a qualitative phase in which the subjects personal experiences are compared with their answers to in-depth interviews. The second phase is a quantitative analysis. This is the method we used in the IRIC study [described above], which is more fully described in our book, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind.
Dr Kawamura: In “Business goals for a new world order: beyond growth, greed, and quarterly results, you step back and look at the results of an international research project, conducted in 17 countries and regions, in which junior managers and professionals rated the importance of a number of personal goals for their countrys successful business leaders. How did the goals differ?
Dr Hofstede: In the 1998 study, we asked junior managers and professionals attending part-time MBA courses to rate the goals-in-use of successful business leaders in their country. Respondents were given a list of 15 goals. The top five goals for all business leaders across all 17 countries were the following:
(1) growth of the business;
(2) continuity of the business;
(3) this years profits;
(4) personal wealth; and
(5) power.
These goals all focus on the immediate interests of the company – growth, continuity, and short-term profits – and on the leaders ego: personal wealth and power.
The middle five goals in overall attributed priority were:
(6) honor, face, reputation;
(7) creating something new;
(8) profits ten years from now;
(9) staying within the law; and
(10) responsibility toward employees.
These deal with stakeholders relationships and the future.
The bottom five goals deal with spiritual and special interests, including:
(11) respecting ethical norms;
(12) responsibility toward society in general;
(13) game and gambling spirit;
(14) patriotism/national pride; and
(15) family interests (such as jobs for relatives).
An interesting finding that emerged was the differences between the countries when the overall ranking – the average – was used as a baseline. In the USA, the goals that were more important than the international average were growth of the business, respecting ethical norms, personal wealth, this years profits, and power. Less important than the international average were profits ten years from now, responsibility toward employees, family interests, creating something new, and continuity of the business.
The goals in China and Germany were the most dissimilar from the international average. In China, the top five were respecting ethical norms, patriotism/national pride, power, honor/face/reputation, and responsibility toward society in general. Less important to the international average were family interests, game and gambling spirit, this years profits, personal wealth, and staying within the law.
Germanys profile was almost opposite to the international ranking, with goals more important than the national average including responsibility toward society in general, responsibility toward employees, creating something new, profits ten years from now, and respecting ethical norms. Less important than the international average were power, patriotism/national pride, personal wealth, growth of the business, and this years profits.
Dr Kawamura: So the different goals of business leaders in different countries reflect their national cultural traits?
Dr Hofstede: Yes. In 2000, most people believed that globalization and the acquisition of companies across borders would wipe out national differences. They also believed that the success of business leaders around the globe depended on how closely they followed American goals. These were naïve assumptions, as a countrys business leaders share the culture of their national society. There is no special culture for executive leaders, as this study showed. National cultures have deep roots, and their differences are not likely to disappear.
It is also important to know that in the study we did not ask leaders directly for their goals. That, too, would be naïve. Our respondents – junior managers and professionals working or having worked in business organizations – may be the most reliable sources of information on their leaders.
Dr Kawamura: In the article, you also state that in hindsight, these findings predicted the 2008 economic crash. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Dr Hofstede: As I described in my article, these were accidental results – a typical example of serendipity.
The results of the study showed that US business leaders were less caring about the continuity of their businesses and the long term than colleagues in other countries. They were less innovative (in spite of their global reputation for being innovative) and less responsible toward their employees. These goals support their traits in national culture (individualistic, masculine, and short-term oriented), which were held in check by regulations that were set aside during the Reagan presidency (1981-1989). Reagan eliminated existing controls on business, lowered business taxes, and fueled a race toward greater size and wealth that had previously been impossible. This all led to an explosive imbalance of payments, astronomical debt levels, business executives paying themselves amounts that were unrelated to their business performance, and scandals.
Dr Kawamura: How can we apply your national culture traits to understanding the economic recession and the changing balance of power between major nations?
Dr Hofstede: As for the recession, I explain this by leaders unlimited greed in some of the leading countries at the time. The changing balance of power is partly an outcome of the recession, although demographic and political factors also played a role.
Dr Kawamura: In the article, you state that a new and different global order will – even must – arise out of the ruins of the existing world order. Can you explain this conclusion?
Dr Hofstede: The combination of regulatory changes, economic recession, US debt levels, and changing power structures in countries around the globe – the increasing power in countries such as India, Brazil, China, and Germany and the decreasing superpower status of the USA – will all lead, I believe, to a new economic world order that will have less fascination with growth itself as a goal and more respect for the interests of society in general.
I recently read Tomas Sedlaceks Economics of Good and Evil. He shows that throughout human history, economic order has always implied basic decisions of a moral nature.
Dr Kawamura: How do national cultural traits and value positions influence dominant economic paradigms of today, such as Chicago economics? How may these value positions be shifting as people (managers and leaders) are calling for sustainable development and societally responsible firms?
Dr Hofstede: Paradigms have their life cycle. This applies to Chicago economics too.
Dr Kawamura: In a symposium held at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, you presented a speech called the “Seven deadly sins in a multicultural world. What are the seven deadly sins? How do they impact cross-cultural research?
Dr Hofstede: The seven deadly sins are unawareness, ethnocentrism, amnesia, professional myopia, conceptual mix-up, academic polemics, and level confusion.
I will briefly define them. Unawareness means that people are often unaware that what they say is a function of where they come from. People also tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe, which is ethnocentrism. Being amnesiac is when people ignore the sense, or impact, of history in their views. Professional myopia suggests that people may be shortsighted in their views because they do not understand how they, and others, are affected by culture, or their mental programming. Conceptual mix-up is when people mix up or confuse different levels of concepts. For example, culture, values, and practices mean many different things – they are constructs that are made up in our minds, and they are useless without clear definitions. What I am suggesting with academic polemics is that all academic research on culture is constrained by the culture of the researcher. This is an excellent reason for researchers to work in synergy with other researchers from different cultural backgrounds: cross-cultural research actually occurs when you compare the results of one independent research team with another. And by level confusion, I mean that because there are numerous levels of moral circles, or cultures, within which people live and operate, it is very important to define your level of analysis when studying it.
Dr Kawamura: In Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, you say that culture is not innate and that it is neither personality nor human nature. Can you help us understand the relationship between culture and personality?
Dr Hofstede: This is a very interesting topic. Culture is learned – it is not innate. It comes from ones social environment rather than ones genes. Culture is different from both human nature and an individuals personality.
Human nature is really a core aspect of all human beings and is inherited with ones genes. It represents the universal level in ones mental software, what all human beings have in common. This level of mental programming includes the human ability to feel all the emotions – fear, anger, love, joy, sadness, and shame. It includes the need to associate with others, to play, and to exercise and the facility to observe the environment and to talk about it in relationship with other humans. What one does with these feelings and abilities – how one expresses them, and so on – is modified by culture.
Personality, on the other hand, is ones unique set of mental programs that are not necessarily shared with other human beings. It is based on traits that are partly inherited through ones unique set of genes and partly learned. Learned means both modified by the influence of culture – collective programming – and by unique personal experiences.
Dr Kawamura: What key questions require further research and study with respect to national culture, organizational culture, and socially responsible and sustainable leadership, organizations, and nations?
Dr Hofstede: Whatever tickles someones curiosity!
Articles and books referred to in the interview
Hofstede, G. (2002), “Whats on my mind: economic theory, culture, and anti-globalization, August, available at: http://geerthofstede.eu/geert.aspx (accessed 2 April 2013).
Hofstede, G. (2009), “Business goals for a new world order: beyond growth, greed, and quarterly results, Asia Pacific Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 481-88.
Hofstede, G. (2011), “Symposium speech: ‘seven deadly sins in a multicultural world’, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, 16 September, available at: "http://www.youtube.com/watch" (accessed 1 April 2013).
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J. and Minkov, M. (2010), Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd ed. (revised and expanded), McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
Hofstede, G., Neuijen, B., Ohayj, D.D. and Sanders, G. (1990), “Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 286-316.