Hofstede Cultural Dimensions Glossary: Key Terms and Definitions

“Power distance can therefore be defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.”

“Individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him- or herself and his or her immediate family. Collectivism as its opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups.”

“A society is called masculine when emotional gender roles are clearly distinct: men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success, whereas women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life.”

“Uncertainty avoidance can therefore be defined as the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations.”

“Long-term orientation stands for the fostering of virtues oriented toward future rewards — in particular, perseverance and thrift. Its opposite pole, short-term orientation, stands for the fostering of virtues related to the past and present — in particular, respect for tradition, preservation of “face,” and fulfilling social obligations.”

“Indulgence stands for a tendency to allow relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Its opposite pole, restraint, reflects a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regulated by strict social norms.”

“Culture consists of the unwritten rules of the social game. It is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others.”

“A dimension is an aspect of a culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. The grouping of the different aspects of a dimension is always based on statistical relationships — that is, on trends for these phenomena to occur in combination, not on iron links.”

“Values are broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others. Values are feelings with an added arrow indicating a plus and a minus side.”

“In Figure 1.2 symbols, heroes, and rituals have been subsumed under the term practices. As such they are visible to an outside observer; their cultural meaning, however, is invisible and lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.”

“Symbols are words, gestures, pictures, or objects that carry a particular meaning that is recognized as such only by those who share the culture. The words in a language or jargon belong to this category, as do dress, hairstyles, flags, and status symbols.”

“Heroes are persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and thus serve as models for behavior.”

“Rituals are collective activities that are technically superfluous to reach desired ends but that, within a culture, are considered socially essential. They are therefore carried out for their own sake.”

“The “we” group (or in-group) is the major source of one’s identity and the only secure protection one has against the hardships of life. Therefore, one owes lifelong loyalty to one’s in-group, and breaking this loyalty is one of the worst things a person can do.”

“The “we” group is distinct from other people in society who belong to “they” groups, of which there are many.”

“People draw a mental line around those whom they consider to be their group. Only members of the moral circle thus delineated have full rights and full obligations.”

“Face is lost when the individual, either through his action or that of people closely related to him, fails to meet essential requirements placed upon him by virtue of the social position he occupies.”

“Collectivist societies, on the contrary, are shame cultures: persons belonging to a group from which a member has infringed on the rules of society will feel ashamed, based on a sense of collective obligation.”

“Individualist societies have been described as guilt cultures: persons who infringe on the rules of society will often feel guilty, ridden by an individually developed conscience that functions as a private inner pilot.”

“A high-context communication is one in which little has to be said or written because most of the information is either in the physical environment or supposed to be known by the persons involved, while very little is in the coded, explicit part of the message.”

“A low-context communication is one in which the mass of information is vested in the explicit code, which is typical for individualist cultures.”

“In individualist societies, the norm is that one should treat everybody alike. In sociological jargon this is known as universalism.”

“As the distinction between “our group” and “other groups” is at the very root of people’s consciousness, treating one’s friends better than others is natural and ethical and is a sound business practice.”

“Organizational culture can be defined as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one organization from others.””

“National cultures are part of the mental software we acquired during the first ten years of our lives, in the family, in the living environment, and in school, and they contain most of our basic values.”

“In our opinion, most corporate values statements are no more than pious wishful thinking, corresponding to one or more top executives’ hobbies. Corporate cultures are moved not by what top managers say or write, but by who they are and what they do.”

“This limitation does not apply, however, for ecological factor analyses, in which the score for each case is the mean of a large number of independent observations. In this situation the stability of the factor structure is determined by the number of individuals whose answers went into the mean scores.”

“The coefficient of correlation expresses the strength of the relationship. If the correlation is perfect, so that one measure follows entirely from the other, the coefficient takes the value 1.00. If the correlation is nonexistent — the two measures are completely unrelated — the coefficient is 0.00.”

“The next step was showing the practical implications of the dimension scores for the countries concerned. This was done quantitatively by correlating the dimension scores with other measures that could be logically expected to reflect the same culture differences.”

“More than fifty countries in the IBM study could, on the basis of their scores on the four dimensions, be sorted into twelve such clusters.”

“The top positions are occupied by China and other East Asian countries. (Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore were known in the last decades of the twentieth century as the “Five Dragons” because of their fast economic growth.)”

“The foreigner usually experiences some form of culture shock... This experience usually leads to feelings of distress, of helplessness, and of hostility toward the new environment.”

“Phase 3, acculturation, sets in when the visitor has slowly learned to function under the new conditions, has adopted some of the local values, finds increased self-confidence, and becomes integrated into a new social network.”

“In multinational business organizations the values and beliefs of the home culture are taken for granted and serve as a frame of reference at the head office. Persons in linchpin roles between foreign subsidiaries and the head office need to be bicultural.”

“Ethnocentrism is to a people what egocentrism is to an individual: considering one’s own little world to be the center of the universe.”

“Cultural relativism affirms that one culture has no absolute criteria for judging the activities of another culture as “low” or “noble.” However, every culture can and should apply such judgment to its own activities, because its members are actors as well as observers.”

“A statistical analysis of the country averages of the answers to questions about the values of similar IBM employees in different countries revealed common problems, but with solutions differing from country to country.”

“Michael Bond, a Canadian having lived and worked in the Far East since 1971, found a creative solution to the Western bias problem. He asked a number of his Chinese colleagues from Hong Kong and Taiwan to help him compose a list of basic values for Chinese people.”

“WVS coordinator Ronald Inglehart, in an initial analysis of his database, announced two main factors, which he called well-being versus survival and secular-rational versus traditional authority. As the following chapters will show, both correlate with our dimension scores.”

“Another large-scale application of the dimensions paradigm is the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) project, conceived by U.S. management scholar Robert J. House in 1991.”

“Culture change can be fast for the outer layers of the onion diagram, labeled practices... Culture change is slow for the onion’s core, labeled values.”

“A striking fact of the various validations is that correlations do not tend to become weaker over time. The IBM national dimension scores (or at least their relative positions) have remained as valid in the year 2010 as they were around 1970.”