Abstract:The study of culture and cultural values continues to be hotly debated among cross-cultural researchers worldwide. Starting with the seminal work of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, and Hofstede, and continuing with more recent efforts, researchers have continued to develop and empirically examine cultural value frameworks in an attempt to understand how cultural differences affect work-related behaviors and attitudes. The purpose of this commentary is to briefly describe the interesting -and counterintuitive -findings from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project, summarize the different interpretations of these findings offered by Maseland and van Hoorn, and by Brewer and Venaik, provide a critique of their arguments, and finally offer a list of possible alternative interpretations and explanations for the conflicting findings in the GLOBE study.GLOBE | Hofstede | cross-cultural research/measurement issues | cultural values | Keywords: cultural value frameworks | work attitudes | business management | international business
Article:The study of culture and cultural values continues to be hotly debated among cross-cultural researchers worldwide. Starting with the seminal work of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) and Hofstede (1980), researchers have continued to develop and empirically examine cultural value frameworks in an attempt to understand how cultural differences affect work-related behaviors and attitudes. One of the most recent attempts to create a comprehensive framework to understand cultural values and their effects has been the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Recently, Maseland and van Hoorn (2009), in their research note published in this journal and revisited in this issue (Maseland & van Hoorn, 2010), and Brewer and Venaik (2010) offered competing explanations for some of the more intriguing findings in the GLOBE study. The purpose of this commentary is to briefly describe the interesting -and counterintuitive -findings from the GLOBE project, summarize the different interpretations of these findings offered by Maseland and van Hoorn (2010) and Brewer and Venaik (2010), and consider possible alternative interpretations and explanations for the conflicting findings in the GLOBE study.
The GLOBE StudyAmong the many attempts to measure the cultures of the world (e.g., Hofstede, 1980;Schwartz, 1992;Smith, Dugan, & Trompenaars, 1996), the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) is one of the most recent, ambitious, and comprehensive efforts. Methodologically, the GLOBE study is very similar to other cultural comparison studies, in that all of them measure culture using a series of self-report survey questions with Likert-type response scales. Nevertheless, the GLOBE study is unique in one important way, in that it measures cultural values and cultural practices separately, and thus provides two different sets of cultural indices.