Models of National Cultural Differences

National cultural differences may be manifested in several interdependent factors in each national environment.  Political, economic, legal, technological, and cultural factors influence the success of managing people and processes in organizations in other countries. If managers understand these factors, the nature of the culture, and how they affect work and work processes, they will be able to figure out how to best manage people and organizational processes in the international location.  Hofstede (1980, 1997) examined the values that underlie organizational behavior and found four bipolar dimensions that explained nearly half of the variance in the work attitudes of 116,000 IBM employees in some 70 countries.  Power distance reflects the degree to which a person accepts that there is inequality among people.  Individualism is the degree to which people identify themselves as individuals rather than as members of a group.  Masculinity describes the degree to which achievement values such as performance, success, competition, and assertiveness prevail over affiliation values such as quality of life, relationships with peers, care of the cohort, and solidarity.  Uncertainty avoidance is the degree to which people prefer predictable and structured situations to unpredictable and unstructured ones.  Other studies have identified similar dimensions of national cultural differences, such as achievement (doing) vs. affiliation (being), high versus low context communication, task versus relationship orientation, equity versus equality, and a tendency toward polychronic vs. monochronic time (Black & Mendenhall, 1990; Hall & Hall, 1990; Trompenaars, 1993).