Femininity Culture: Masculinity Vs. Femininity

Masculinity versus femininity

This dimension doesn’t correlate directly with gender roles or behaviours. Instead this is more orientated towards specific traits that Hofstede has defined as masculine and low masculine (femininity). A high masculine culture is characterized by focusing on money, possessions, and traditional family values. Feminine cultures are said to be relationship oriented, focused on quality of life, and failing is generally more accepted. This is best describe by the commonly used phrase “Americans live to work, while Europeans work to live. Indian culture is considered to be moderately masculine with a score of 56. This can be seen by the importance of higher earnings and recognition at work is within Indian culture. The

In Feminine culture, the society is more worry about relationships, encouragement and better quality of life. At business level negotiation, for Femininity society, the relationship and quality of good or service matter the most than the price.

At Corporate level negotiation if a corporate is from INDIA or United State which possess Masculinity culture and other from Vietnam which is a Femininity culture it is necessary to understand the culture to get better deal. As already discussed, dealing with Feminine culture soft bargaining negotiation could be more impactful compare to hard bargaining negotiation. Whereas, when the parties are from India and USA, hard bargaining and principled bargaining could be used.

However, it can be seen that the higher a country scores in Masculinity the higher is the gender gap in the society. For instance, In China and India this gender gap be easily seen. In these societies Men are more dominant. One can criticise the Hofstede research findings about the Masculinity and Femininity dimension as “the MAS scores are mainly based on men’s answers” (Hofstede G. , 1984). Hofstede analysis of culture considering the gender would give a different

In the meantime, the United States has a relatively low score of 26; this indicates that Americans are very practical and generally less willing to accept present losses in exchange for benefit in the distant future (Hamilton & Webster, The International Business Environment, 3rd edition, 2015, p. 171). They also value punctuality since they keep appointment calendars and “live accordingly to schedules and clocks.” (Robbins & Coulter, Management, 10th edition, 2009, p.97). Surprisingly in this section, India scores 51, so we cannot determine whether India culture is long-term or short-term oriented. Professor Hofstede explained that the concept of “karma” dominates religious and philosophical thought so time is not as important as it is in the West. Take into account these differences between countries; you can expect that doing business and negotiation in Asia will take much longer than in the USA because Asian people tend to build a relationship first while Americans seek instant gratification and quick result (Roberts, The American Scholar, 2014). Scores of Vietnam was marked with an asterisk (*) which states that the research is not officially from Greert Hofstede but have been added through other research