Individualism, Hofstede to House

The definition of culture that I particularly enjoy is "how we do things around here" (Deal & Kennedy, 1982, p. 4), which I have written about before (here). This works for us as families, as locales, as societies. And sometimes this will be overt and visible (e.g. the low context culture of Germany, where people tell us when we make a wrong move; Hall, 1989) and sometimes this will be covert and hidden (e.g. the high context culture of China where no one will say anything when we make a social gaffe; Hall, 1989). 

However, there are other ways to consider culture. If we take our culture in Aotearoa on the Hofstede (1980) Individualism/collectivism cultural continuum, we might think that a score of 79 meant we were highly individualistic. That we thought of ourselves in 'me' terms, emphasising self-reliance, initiative and being a meritocracy (Hofstede, 2022). While some of that is relatively true, that would be without considering where other nations score on this particular continuum. 

Hofstede's big data set was collected somewhere between 1974 and the late 70s for his PhD thesis while he was in HR at IBM, which he completed and published in 1980 (Hofstede, 1980). Basically he sent out surveys to all staff in all IBM branches around the world, and crunched the dataset on IBMs mainframes. He found - on the individualism/collectivism scale - that managers in Australia, the UK, and the USA all scored between 89 and 91; New Zealand 79, and China - if we use Taiwan as a proxy as China was closed - was 17 (CSU San Marcos, 2004).

Then, in the mid-90s, Robert House and his team re-ran the cultural continuum experiments. Their data, published in 2004, shows that China now scores 16; and New Zealand had shifted to 49. The others - Australia, UK and the USA - retain their highly individualistic scores (House et al., 2004). So it appears that Aotearoa has become more collective as a society in the intervening 20+ years between those two studies.

It would be very interesting if another researcher decided to run this data again: I would be most interested to see if there was a move for New Zealand to become more collective over time. In this particular value, Aotearoa seems more collective than Australia, but we need hard data to be sure just how much.

Sam

References:

Deal, T. E. & Kennedy, A. A. (1982). Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

CSU San Marcos (2004). Hofstede’s Dimensions of Culture. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/3542579/hofstedes-theory

Hall, E. T. (1989). Understanding Cultural Differences. Intercultural Press.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Cultures Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Hofstede Insights. (2022). Country comparison: New Zealand. https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/new-zealand/

House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. SAGE Publications, Inc.