Geert Hofstede

Geert Hofstede is a social psychologist who until his retirement was Professor of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Director of the Institute for Research on Inter-Cultural Cooperation there. In the early 1970s he and his colleagues carried out a major systematic study of workrelated attitudes based on two questionnaire surveys, which produced a total of over 116,000 questionnaires from over seventy countries around the world making it by far the largest organizationally based study ever to have been carried out. Those respondents whose replies were used by Hofstede for research purposes were all sales and service employees of subsidiaries of IBM a US-based multinational corporation which operates in most countries in the world. Within the sales and service function all types of employees were surveyed sales clerks, professional engineers, top managers, etc. using the language of each country. A total of twenty different language versions of the questionnaire had to be made. The IBM employees represented well-matched sub-sets from each country: same company, job and education but different nationalities. National cultural differences found within the company, therefore, are likely to be a conservative estimate of those existing within the countries at large. The survey was repeated after four years with stable results, underlining the persistent cultural nature of the differences found. Hofstede identifies four basic dimensions of the differences between national cultures based on the forty larger subsidiaries on which the first analyses were made. Each of the national cultures can be positioned from high to low on each of the four scales, and thus has a distinctive cultural profile. The four dimensions are: