Multicultural Business Environment, Geert Hofstede's Cultural Dimension Research Paper

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multicultural business environment, Geert Hofstede's cultural dimension provide an interesting framework by which to understand the management function. Hofstede proposed that there are five dimensions along which cultures differ -- power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, and time horizon. Managers today must understand each of these dimensions, because they closely relate to how well the workers in the company are going to respond to management challenges.

Hofstede's Dimensions

Since their inception, Hofstede's dimensions have come under scrutiny by the academic community, even though people in business have found them particularly useful to put intercultural interactions into their appropriate context. Hofstede (2011) himself notes that the dimensions are aggregate, and should not be placed on any given individual, because while some individuals more readily fit the dimensions, every individual is different and it is risky to assume that there is going to always be a perfect fit. What Hofstede describes is not necessarily going to be the way that the different cultures in the workplace manifest. The dimensions, nevertheless, are value for a manager who wants to gain a basic understanding of the intercultural issues in management.

It should also be noted that Hofstede's cultural dimensions have been refined over time. For example, Minkov & Hofstede (2011) note that the dimensions have changed several times as more data is gathered about different cultures. New cultural dimensions have been introduced to the model to reflect more accurately the new findings about how cultures manifest themselves in the modern workplace.

Taras, Kirkman and Steel (2014) note that the cultural dimensions affect the workplace in different ways. The first is that emotions and attitudes are the most significant impacts, with behaviors and job performance being secondary. Thus, how workers perceive their situations is likely to be affected the most by where they are from. For managers, this has significant implications.

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It is not that workers from other cultures are going to have adverse performance where there are intercultural issues, but their attitudes and therefore their long-term impact on the workplace might be quite different. The result of this is that managers need to be cognizant of the dynamics that working with different cultures brings -- it is mostly on the interpersonal dimensions.

The response to multiculturalism and its impact on the workforce has been to find ways to create a unifying culture, for example building consensus in the workplace, and seeking universal leadership that spans all cultures within the organization (Jones, et al., 2014). What this means for the organization is that managers need to foster a sort of universal culture within the organization. Even companies that are multinational need to do this, in order to maintain their appeal across a number of different dimensions in business.

Personal Reflection

A number of the concepts that we have studied ring true. The one mentioned above, Hofstede's cultural dimensions, rings true in that I have worked in multicultural environments and these truths I hold to be self-evident. First, that people from different cultures are quite different at times. As a co-worker, you mostly need to just have a basic working knowledge of this reality, but as manager you need to influence the different workers so you need to know how to do that. The second aspect of this is that Hofstede mentioned that each person is individual, and should not be expected to behave entirely in line with the group norm, and that is something that I would expect to hold here as well -- cultural dimensions are sort of a baseline expectation but….....

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