Dimensions of culture

Edgar Schein, a famous organizational psychologist, says that culture can be defined as:

• the way a society resolves issues.

In other words, groups of people (a society) have been confronted with certain problems. They found ways to handle problems, found solutions to them. Solutions that worked well will be taught to new members of the group. In that way, they will learn how to perceive, think and feel about problems.

Because culture will be taught to all new members, it will eventually become 'the way we do things around here'. As you can imagine, 'the way we do things around here', can be quite different from one place or the other. 

Scholars have found ways to compare cultures.

Different aspects of cultures that can be compared are called 'dimensions'.* Dimensions of culture are measurable ways to show that cultures are different.

Measurement means:

• You come up with a statement about subject A and
• then ask if people agree or disagree with it.
• You go to country 1 first and ask a lot of people in that country if they agree or disagree (or strongly agree or disagree).
• Then you go to country 2 and do the same.
• And then to country 3.
• Let's say in country 1 only 10% of people agree with your statement.
• In country 2 you find that 50% of the people agree with the statement about subject A.
• And in country 3 90% agrees with that same statement.
• Then you will have found that subject A is a 'cultural dimension'

Power distance as one of the dimensions

Geert Hofstede did a lot of research in the 1980s. He came up with questions about what people value in the workplace. Around 117,000 surveys were conducted in more than 65 countries. He made groups of related questions and compared the answers given by people in different countries.

In that way he was able to come up with scores from 0 to 100 for many countries. After Geert, several other people came with other dimensions. One of the dimensions most experts agree on is:

• power distance.

To read more about power distance, go to the next article. Among other things, you will also learn how people from

• The Philippines
• The Russian Federation
• The Netherlands

and some other countries feel about 'power distance'.