Hofstede: Cultural Dimensions Theory And Cultural Context Theory

In general, ‘Culture’ refers to values, beliefs, and customs that exist in society. Hofstede gives a definition that “Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from other”. Although definitions of culture vary, there is common that culture is shared, adaptive, and transmitted across generation. It is certain that culture plays an important role in organizational behavior, since the values applied in each organization in the world differ across cultures. Due to globalization, importance of assessing culture in the filed has grown rapidly over the past two decades. Therefore, in order to improve management and have the right effect on employees, it is necessary to understand

Hofstede’s theory is a cross-cultural communication model for measuring the differences of culture values that describes how these values related to one’s behavior, structuring several dimensions of cultures. Cultural Context theory is a framework describes a culture’s style of communication, categorizing cultures into “high context” and “low context”. High context culture refers to those in which the rules of communication are primarily transmitted through the use of contextual elements, for example; body language, and are not explicitly stated. In contrast, low context culture is that in which information is communicated primarily through language and rules are explicitly spelled out. This report will demonstrate that understanding and measuring culture values based on these two theories would help to improve understanding of organizational

For example, Sagie et al. (1996) studied the relationships of culture and work motivation in individualistic and collectivistic cultures and found that achievement motivation is stronger in individualistic than collectivistic culture, since collectivists believe that positive outcomes result from collective efforts. Early (1999) examined the role of power distance and group efficacy and found that the higher status groups, the stronger group efficacy judgments, whereas in low power distance cultures, members contributes equally to collective efficacy judgments. The theories utilized Hofstede’s concept as a framework for assessing culture and its impact on organizational