Compare your culture with the Hofstede dimensions
You can check the culture of your own country against other countries online on Geert Hofstede’s own company website, where the scores on cultural dimensions discussed in this post are published. As mentioned earlier, this may be helpful in estimating expected culture shock when entering a new country - furterhmore, and this is what it is aimed at, it may be helpful in understanding how to manage branches in multinational corporations.
Apparently my home country of Norway is so feminized we come out on the extreme lower end of the masculinity dimension, together with Sweden, with values of 8 and 5 respectively on a scale that goes to at least 110 (which is the score of the macho Slovakians). This IBM study can’t possibly have included measures on the ability to light bonfires in the snow, cross-country skiing in storms and fist-fighting polar bears..
The view expressed on the website may also present a fundament some people may object to:
“Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.” Prof. Geert Hofstede, Emeritus Professor, Maastricht University
Read more about Geert Hofstede in his wikipedia write-up or his own website. There’s also some criticism of his work - not surprisingly. This paper takes a critical look at the application of the data and does a simple case of comparing Australia and Indonesia, but comes to the conclusion that there are more support for Hofstede’s approach than there are problems. There’s also a lengthy criticism here by Prof. Brendan McSweeney of the University of Essex.
