Culture - page 1
Keywords: “Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values.” (Brooks, 2006)
By artclub on 28/08/2010
Level: Postgraduate Diploma
Page Number: 1 of 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9“Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values.” (Brooks, 2006)
Culture of a nation highly influence the business environment of organizations, every nation has its own norms, beliefs, values and thoughts. Therefore, in term of globalization , the managers of a enterprise of a country has to be aware of their identity, values, morals and attitudes for better interaction with foreign culture.
Franck(2008) defined “Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of times, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving”. So for the better performance of an organization, its manager has to understand the cross cultural differences.
For the better understanding of culture, I have decided to critically compare the two cross culture models of Hofstede and Trompenaars and Hampden Turner with the evidence of critics and their usefulness of each for the manager of my country Pakistan.
Hofstede’s model (1984) consists of five cultural dimensions. These are power distance (From small to large), collectivism versus individualism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance (from weak to strong) and orientation (long term to short term).
In the light of hofstede’s cross cultural model, in case of individualism his rating for Pakistan is 14, which is very below the world average its mean that collectivism is high in Pakistan. In power distance his rating is 55, indicating that Pakistan is high in power distance, in masculinity 50, which is showing that Pakistan is highly masculine oriented society. Uncertainness avoidance is rating is 70 which is high in average as compare to other countries of world. (Lann et.al, 2006)
Aslam (2004) supported Hofstede’s five culture dimension. Pakistan’s relatively high collectivist ,there is high tendency toward uncertainty avoidance, high power distance exist and masculinity largely account for many traditions and practices including strict adherence to hierarchy, wide gap between rich and poor, centralization, corruption, nepotism and gender discrimination roles.
Hussain(1999) supports the fact that Pakistan culture is collectivist; people are very status conscious and having a large power distance because of money, race and caste. The social setup depends on family which make the personality of a person. People are dependent in decision making because of family
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