Overview of Hofstede Cultural Model and its dimension

This report gives a brief about Hofstede cultural model, personal opinion and suggestions for improvement.

MAIN BODY

Hofstede cultural model

Hofstede culture dimension is basically the framework which is mainly used for understanding the cross-cultural differences in different countries and thus concerns with the way in which business in conducted across various cultures. This articles has incorporated the four different cultural dimension which has been identified by Hofstede and which have a profound and deepest impact on business environment (Beugelsdijk, Kostova and Roth, 2017). The four dimensions mentioned in this article are

Individualism and collectivis

This dimension mainly consist of the fact that how much people of a particular culture are are self-oriented and what their behaviour reflects. The individual culture mainly have high value on the individual achievement as well as self-interest (Khlif, 2016). Collectivism culture is the dimension which mainly focusses on working towards the goals as well as group harmony.

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Power distance

This dimension generally stresses upon the power inequality and discrimination between superiors as well as subordinates. For example- US have high as well as low power culture and the culture having high power distance are more likely to be hierarchical (Favaretto and et.al.,2016).

Uncertainty avoidance

This dimension of the model explains how the society members respond and react to ambiguity as well as uncertainty. Mostly the cultures which have high scores on this dimension are more likely to avoid and prevent risk-taking (Beugelsdijk and Welzel, 2018). Organizations having this culture have a large number of rules for preventing employees to deviate from their goals. On the other hand, cultures which have less avoidance of uncertainty like Canada believes that innovation as well as risk-taking are significant in attaining outcomes.

Mostly the organizations which operates on the global level are required to adjust to different environment and most of them emphasizes on the employee's diversity for handling the customers across the world (Taras, 2017). The Hofstede culture mainly defines the cultural values of people and dies nit explain the organizational cultures which forms its biggest limitation. Culture of the employees that are working at global level might be contrasting to national culture thus having consistent organizational values are essential.

Personal opinion

Although this article have explained the Hofstede cultural dimension in depth and have given a great example of each and every dimension but the suggestions which this article has made are somewhat different and contrasting from my perspective. This article has explained that the first dimension of Hofstede which is individualism and collectivism is basically the degree to which people of particular culture are self-oriented and the example of US which it has given for the individualistic culture is totally right and I agree with this statement. The culture of US concerns with the interest of an individual and thus frames the principles which for rewarding the achievement of single individual.  Power distance is basically the extent to which power inequality mainly exists between the superiors as well as subordinates (Beugelsdijk, Kostova and Roth, 2017). As per the article, US have both high and low power distance culture but in real US ranks higher in terms of the inequality and have a score more than 40. This is due to the fact that the ratio of inequality among the members of society belonging to particular culture has increased from 23.5% to nearly 62.6% and there has been more than 10000 cases of inequality in US as per the report of 2018. Thus, United Sates have a high power culture where mainly men dominates women and rich dominates poor.

On the other hand, the article states that Great Britain have high index and score on uncertainty dimension upon which I totally disagree. Great Britain actually have least score on the uncertainty avoidance meaning that they tend to walk on the single path and avoid risk-taking. They are more likely to prevent inculcating innovation in each and every aspect and thus believes that innovation does not matter in achieving the successful outcomes (Khlif, 2016). The biggest example to support my statement is the decreased ratio of innovation an technological advancements in Great Britain which has dropped from 45.2% to more than 21.2%. Besides this, there are not many strict rules in Great Britain which the society have to adhere and thus according to the British ranking report, people ion Great Britain are more comfortable within ambiguous situation. 

Suggestions for improvement

The major problem which the organizations faces is the deviation in culture and values of employees working in organization as well as culture of national culture. This impacts the functioning of an organization to a great extent (Favaretto and et.al.,2016). For this, organizations should frame their values and policies in such a way that it favours all the employees from different culture. Besides developing their own values as well as culture, organization should analyse the national culture and should look for the congruence with employee's values. Based on this, organizations should frame their values. For example- organization should function ethically keeping in mind the culture of all the employees.

Apart from this, as Hofstede culture only explains the value and culture of people across countries and not stresses upon organizational culture thus, to better understand cross-cultural communication, organizations should make use of other cultural model. The most effective cultural model which basically link the organizational structure together with organizational culture is Handy's model (Beugelsdijk and Welzel, 2018). This model generally helps the organisation to learn various sub-cultures that exist in company and how they are important for achieving the goals and objectives. This model encompasses four different culture which are power culture, role culture, support culture and task culture. Therefore in order to have an understanding of organisational culture instead of applying Hofstede model, management should use Handy's model. This will help them to understand what cultural factors drives the employees and what types of culture is most effective in particular situation.

CONCLUSION

It has been summarized that Hofstede cultural dimension plays an important role in understanding the cross-cultural differences which exists across different cultures. The various dimensions of this model helps to understand the cultures of people and to what extent different countries apply these dimensions. In order to understand the organizational culture, firms should use other cultural models like Handy's model as Hofstede model mainly explain the culture of society as a whole and not just the organization.

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