Two weeks i had the privilege to go to a conference presented by Mr Nick B. Meyer which was called "Dealing with Cultural Differences", he exposed the ideas of the five cultural dimentions in a society, this 5D are the results thof a study made by the Mr.Geert Hofstede, a successful writter of netherland on the cultural relations field. the 5D are:
- Power Distance
- Individualism
- Masculinity
- Uncertain avoidance
- Long Term Orientation
Mr Meyer exposes that this dimentions are really important to understand and have a more realistic notion of today´s globalized world, personally, i found two of this dimetions more important, without taking out importance of the other 3, Power Distance and Long Term Orientation.
Power Distance: This dimention says that in the different countries of the world, there is certain acceptance or rejection on the fact that the distribution of power is unequal and generally treated in a Hierachical way in wich the power is concentrated in the top and is spread in the other parts unequally. this kind of structures, are accepted in most of the work organizations, some transnationals and in the countries structures. Hofstede created a scale in order to percieve the acceptance or rejection of certain countries, as an example, USA has a puntuation of near 40, that means that there´s no total rejection of power distance but neither a total acceptance of this kind of structure. Russia in the other hand is arround 90, that means that is one of the countries with most acceptance of the Hierarchical structures.
Long Term Orientation: in the beggining, Hofstede developed just 4 dimentions but he wanted to do a distinction between east - west lifestyle, so he created a new dimention based on the confucian teaching, the dimention goes on how life is oriented based on the idea that the gratness in our results is more important than find the result we want. also says that countries with LTO persevere more looking for slow results instead the search of inmediate results. this LTO dimetion, was studied just in 23 countries due the difficult of its develpement so was just made in 23 countries and foun that the countries of Asia, generally are more LTO than the west countries.
to finish this post, i would like to show you one video tha my inercultural managemnt teacher shows in one class and i think could be a funny video to perceive the difference in East- West perception, in this case, China- Germany.
Hope you enjoy it as i do!
Have a great week
Perception differences West- East (Germany- China)
Refferences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Hofstede
http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/long-term-orientation/
I loved the video you recommended. it takes the fundamental core of both cultures and make it so easy to understand for anyone who sees it.
ResponderEliminarMauricio, the cultural dimensions are one of my passion as an international negotiator, we need to have clear the advantages we could have if we prepared ourselves in knowing more about the country or the person, we are making the business, the web page of http://www.geert-hofstede.com/ is really useful.
ResponderEliminar