MGMT 8425M Week 2 Framework Appraisal Example

A Country Score Is Not a Person: A Framework Appraisal of Hofstede's Dimensions, Fixing the Level at Which They Hold and Testing Them on a Manager About to Tell a Transferring Engineer That Her Promotion Is Deferred

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Walden University

MGMT 8425M: Responding to Behavior and Change as a Multicultural Leader

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Month Day, Year

A Country Score Is Not a Person: A Framework Appraisal of Hofstede's Dimensions, Fixing the Level at Which They Hold and Testing Them on a Manager About to Tell a Transferring Engineer That Her Promotion Is Deferred

What the Scores Were Built From

Hofstede's model describes national cultures along a handful of dimensions, including acceptance of unequal power, the pull between individual and group, comfort with ambiguity and a contrast between competitive and caring values, with two dimensions added later. The original scores came from attitude surveys of IBM employees in more than 50 countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hofstede (2001) aggregated the responses by country, so that each dimension score summarizes how a country's sample of employees answered, relative to other countries. The model's appeal is obvious: it turns cultural difference into numbers a manager can look up.

The Level at Which a Score Holds

A country score describes a national average. It says nothing direct about any individual inside the country, and Hofstede himself warned against reading the scores as descriptions of persons. Treating a national mean as a trait of each citizen is a version of what methodologists call the ecological fallacy. The research record supports the warning. Taras et al. (2010), meta-analyzing 598 studies with more than 200,000 individuals, found that cultural values measured at the individual level predicted organizational outcomes with modest strength on average, more strongly for emotions and attitudes than for behaviors, and least strongly for job performance. McSweeney (2002) went further, questioning whether the IBM samples could represent national cultures at all and whether nations have coherent cultures that cause behavior.

Sophisticated Stereotyping, Named

Osland and Bird (2000) called the use of bipolar dimension models "sophisticated stereotyping": more informed than crude stereotypes, but still a generalization applied to people it may not fit. They argued that people working across cultures meet paradoxes the dimensions cannot explain, and that in a given context some values take precedence over others, a pattern they called value trumping. Culture, on their account, has to be read in context.

The Deferral Conversation, Tested

Daniel, a plant engineering manager in Ohio, must tell Camila, a process engineer who transferred from the company's plant in Brazil eight months ago, that the promotion she expected this year has been deferred until the plant's line expansion is complete. Before the meeting, Daniel looked up Brazil's scores on a consulting firm's website and drafted his approach around them. Seeing that Brazil's power distance score exceeds the American one, he planned to deliver the decision firmly, as a settled matter from above, with little room for discussion. Because it scores higher on uncertainty avoidance, he planned to give her a precise new date. Because it scores lower on individualism, he planned to frame the deferral around the team's needs rather than her career.

The appraisal tests each expectation. The model supports the general observation that, across a national sample, Brazilian employees on average reported more acceptance of hierarchical distance and more discomfort with uncertainty than American employees in the same company. It does not support any of Daniel's predictions about Camila. Her file shows she chose to transfer, which already distinguishes her from the average employee in her home plant. In her first review, she asked for a written development plan and pushed back on a rating she thought unfair, behavior that hardly suggests deference to hierarchy. The model cannot tell Daniel whether Camila will hear a firm, closed delivery as respectful or as dismissive, or whether a team framing will feel considerate or evasive.

The precise new date is the one expectation that might help, but not for the reason Daniel gave. A specific date with conditions is good practice for any deferral, because it lets the employee judge whether the promise is credible. Daniel's plan would be the same if he ignored the scores entirely.

A Rule of Use

The appraisal proposes one rule: use country scores to generate questions, never to answer them. A manager may reasonably ask whether hierarchy or uncertainty will matter in a conversation, and the scores can suggest where to look. The answer has to come from the person: her history, her own statements and how she has responded before. For Daniel, that means opening the meeting by asking what Camila had understood about the promotion timeline, delivering the decision with its reasons and conditions, and inviting her response rather than closing the topic.

Limits

This appraisal uses one composite case and one model. GLOBE's measures distinguish practices from values and might fare somewhat differently, though the level-of-analysis problem applies to any country-level score.

References

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage.

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. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726702551004

Osland, J. S., & Bird, A. (2000). Beyond sophisticated stereotyping: Cultural sensemaking in context. Academy of Management Executive, 14(1), 65-77. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.2000.2909840

Taras, V., Kirkman, B. L., & Steel, P. (2010). Examining the impact of Culture's consequences: A three-decade, multilevel, meta-analytic review of Hofstede's cultural value dimensions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(3), 405-439. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018938