Before I plunge into today’s topic I would like to revisit the subject of bullying which I first addressed in a post which appeared here in July: https://www.herbnestler.com/blog/2018/4/16/social-media-bullying
My attention was recently directed to a very informative article published online by a California-based law firm https://www.hoganinjury.com/workplace-bullying-what-does-the-law-say/ While laws are not the same everywhere, persons who feel they are being bullied will find useful information in this article. Thank you Hogan Injury for this resource.
And now on with today’s topic.
You may be familiar with the name Geert Hofstede. He is the Dutch social psychologist, former IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research of cross-cultural groups and organizations. His most notable work has been in developing the cultural dimensions theory. The five dimensions, which he has expanded now to six, are: Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation and Indulgence/Restraint. He is known for his books Culture's Consequences and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, co-authored with his son Gert Jan Hofstede.
As an employee of IBM in the 1980’s, Hofstede did quantitative research to understand how IBM was different in more than 50 countries. For example, how did the French culture give IBM a different corporate culture from IBM USA? While the countries in question have changed in the past three decades and IBM has changed dramatically, the result was a vocabulary for discussing culture and a way to compare different national cultures without corporate culture clouding the results. In other words, if you compare Siemens Germany with General Electric USA you have two variables, national culture and corporate culture. But not so when comparing the same company around the globe.,
Bob Waisfisz is the founder of The Hofstede Centre. He has used SlideShare (an interesting site where many ideas and materials are shared, now part of LinkedIn) to post an article entitled “From Satisfied Employees to a Satisfying Corporate Culture” (click to read) in which he says that traditional employee satisfaction surveys may not be as revealing about whether the organization is in the right track as we often think. He proposes that we should be surveying corporate culture and how it fits with employee needs.
What he calls “labor satisfaction surveys” measure whether respondents like working in the organization whereby culture surveys measure how respondents relate to each other, to the outside world and to their work.
The “like” factor is like trying to get someone to like you with bribes. It leads to being overly generous to the transcendental wishes of employees but ignoring the stuff that counts: belonging, pride, commitment, etc.
Waisfisz admits that creating a survey of the organizational culture and how it fits with employee needs and expectations is much more difficult that asking about whether they have gotten enough of what they want at the moment: a nice raise, flexible work hours, etc.
Have a look at the SlideShare article mentioned above and if you want to learn more about Hofstede and his cultural dimensions, go to http://geert-hofstede.com/.
