The world-famous Hofstede 6 dimensional model consisting of dimensions such as individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity-femininity, and long term orientations. Hofstede developed his original model to examine a worldwide survey of employees of IBM between 1967 and 1973. What are the limitations of cultural dimensional model? How it can be eliminated?
Hofstede does not take into account cultural diversity, migration and women empowerment and ascribes culture to the geographical place of residence. Which does not hold today.
Due to globalization many national culture dimensions become mixed and blurred.
There was a lively debate between Hofstede en McSweeney in the journal Human Relations on the limitations of viewing culture in terms of dimensions.
In short, these were some of McSweeney's critiques:
I strongly recommend reading up on the debate itself, however, as Hofstede offered a good defense and the debate was fiery (to say the least):
Hofstede does not take into account cultural diversity, migration and women empowerment and ascribes culture to the geographical place of residence. Which does not hold today.
I am a cross cultural training consultant. Cultures are never deterministic but they do give general, broadstroke directions and mental maps to people in society and in the workplace. National cultures have changed dramatically in the 50 years since Geert Hofstede’‘s original research for IBM employees, but ethno-linguistic World Views have changed less so. World view being “deepest seated assumptions about what is good and what is real”. I have found that there is still enough accuracy in the six dimensions questions to identify the major themes of world view. And with those major themes / tendencies identified, broadstroke cultural differences are also identified. This is the value of Hofstede’s work. When major differences are identified, a basis for evaluating your own cultural tendencies is presented and an opportunity for training towards change / adjustment becomes apparent and available.
There are many limits to Hofstede's model. Trompenaars and McSweeney wrote many papers about this in the 90's and 00's. Two years ago, a colleague and I published a systematic analysis of the MAS index, concluding Hofstede's claims were not supported by data. The paper is here: Article Challenging the Masculinity index: The end of a cross-cultural myth
Dear colleague Nayan Kadam,
See this article: Article Geert Hofstede et al’s Set of National Cultural Dimensions-P...
I am now writing my bachelor thesis about agile project management in the middle east and I would be very interessted to know the scope of using this model to explain the influnce of the cutural factor on the failure or success of the IT projects in the middle east
Alaa Ballan This is an interesting paper for your research in the middle east. Hope you find it useful.
Thank you very much Mr. Kadam. I will look into it. I appreciate your help.
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