Geert Hofstede facts for kids

Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede (born October 2, 1928 – died February 12, 2020) was a Dutch social psychologist. He worked for IBM and was a professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He was famous for his important studies on how different cultures work in groups and organizations.

Geert Hofstede is best known for creating one of the first and most popular ways to understand cultures around the world. He described national cultures using six main ideas, called "dimensions":

• Power Distance: How much people accept that power is not shared equally.
• Individualism: Whether people focus on themselves or on their group.
• Uncertainty Avoidance: How much people feel uncomfortable with things that are unknown or unclear.
• Masculinity: How much a society values things like being strong and competitive, versus caring for others and quality of life.
• Long Term Orientation: How much a society focuses on future rewards, like saving money or being persistent.
• Indulgence vs. Restraint: Whether people try to control their desires and impulses, or let themselves enjoy life and have fun.

He wrote important books like Culture's Consequences and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. The second book was written with his son, Gert Jan Hofstede. It also looked at how cultures work inside companies, which is different from national cultures, but can also be measured.

About Geert Hofstede

Geert Hofstede was born to Gerrit and Evertine Geessine Hofstede. He went to school in The Hague and Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. He finished high school in 1945. In 1953, he earned a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology.

After working in factories for ten years, Hofstede went back to school part-time. He studied at University of Groningen in the Netherlands and earned his PhD in social psychology in 1967. His special project was called "The Game of Budget Control."

Early Career

After graduating in 1953, Hofstede joined the Dutch military for two years as a technical officer. From 1955 to 1965, he worked in different companies, starting as a factory worker in Amsterdam.

In 1965, he began his studies at Groningen and also started working at IBM International. At IBM, he trained managers and managed the department that studied employees. He created and led the Personnel Research Department.

From 1971 to 1973, he took a break from IBM. During this time, he was a guest teacher at IMEDE (now called the International Institute for Management Development). In 1980, Hofstede helped start and became the first director of the IRIC. This was an institute for research on how different cultures work together. It has been at Tilburg University since 1998.

Later Years and Awards

After he retired in 1993, Hofstede visited many universities around the world. He taught students about his ideas and continued his research. He was a professor at Maastricht University and also worked with the Center of Economic Research at Tilburg University.

Hofstede received many special awards. In 2011, he was made a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, which is a very high honor in the Netherlands. He also received honorary doctorates (special degrees) from seven universities in Europe. These included Nyenrode Business University, New Bulgarian University, and University of Tartu. He was also an honorary professor at universities in Hong Kong and Beijing, China.

In 1955, Hofstede married Maaike A. van den Hoek. They had four sons: Gert-Jan, Rokus, Bart, and Gideon. Gert-Jan Hofstede worked a lot with his father and wrote several books about culture studies together. Geert Hofstede also had ten grandchildren.

In 2014, a movie about Hofstede's life and work was released, called An Engineer's Odyssey. He received his ninth honorary doctorate in Prague in 2016, when he was 88 years old. Geert Hofstede passed away on February 12, 2020.

Hofstede's Work

Hofstede was a researcher who studied how organizations work, especially how different cultures affect them. He was a leader in studying groups and companies from different cultures. He helped create a clear way to understand and compare national cultures and company cultures. His studies showed that groups of people from different countries or regions have different cultures. These cultures then affect how societies and organizations behave.

How His Ideas Started

When World War II ended, Geert Hofstede was seventeen. He had lived in the Netherlands under difficult conditions, so he wanted to see the world. In 1947, he traveled to Indonesia as an assistant ship's engineer. This was his first time outside his country, and he learned a lot about a foreign culture. This trip was an early reason for him to study different cultures.

He was also influenced by a trip to England, where he experienced "culture shock". He was surprised by the cultural differences between England and the Netherlands, even though they are close European countries. These early experiences led him to a lifelong career in studying cultures.

Another important time in his life was working in factories from 1955 to 1965. He held different jobs, even starting as a mechanic. This experience helped him see how organizations work from the inside. His background as an engineer shaped how he did his research. He said he still thought like an engineer, trying to be clear and specific. This was important for him to measure cultures using different ideas.

Research at IBM

At IBM International, Hofstede trained managers and managed the employee research department. This was when he moved from engineering to psychology. He helped introduce and use employee surveys in over 70 IBM offices around the world. He traveled across Europe and the Middle East, interviewing people and doing surveys. He wanted to understand how people behaved in large companies and how they worked together.

He collected a lot of information, but his daily job kept him from doing much research. In 1971, he took a two-year break from IBM. During this time, he looked closely at all the information he had collected. He found that there were big differences between cultures in different countries. The results from IBM's surveys, with over 100,000 questionnaires, were one of the largest collections of international information at the time.

He became a guest teacher at IMEDE in Switzerland. There, he gave some of the IBM survey questions to his students. These students were international managers from over 30 countries and many different types of companies. Hofstede found that the same results he saw in the IBM surveys also showed up in his students. This was the first strong proof that the differences among countries were not just about IBM. Instead, they were because people grew up in the same country and shared similar ways of thinking and behaving.

Hofstede went back to IBM and told them about the huge amount of information they had. He wanted to start a research project to study this new way of looking at the data. Since he didn't get the chance to do this research at IBM, he found two part-time jobs. He became a professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Brussels and also taught at INSEAD business school in France.

Between 1973 and 1979, he worked on the data. He used ideas from psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology to connect his findings to a bigger picture. In 1980, he published his book Culture's Consequences, which shared the results of his analysis.

Understanding National Cultures

Hofstede's studies first identified four main ideas, or "dimensions," of national culture. He looked at information from 40 different countries. As a trained psychologist, he first looked at the survey data from each person. But after two years, he realized he needed to look at the data by country. By grouping people by their countries, he could study national cultures instead of just individual personalities.

Hofstede's model, which explained cultural differences between countries, became very important when it was introduced in 1980. This was a time when cultural differences were becoming more important for business and politics. Many business leaders liked his model, especially after his 1991 book, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, came out.

In 1980, Hofstede helped start the IRIC, the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation. Much of his research on the basic ideas of national cultures came from the IRIC. In 2001, Hofstede published a new version of Culture's Consequences. In 2010, a third version of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind was published. This book added two new cultural dimensions and covered between 76 and 93 countries. It also talked about company cultures as something separate from national cultures.

Different Views on His Work

Even though Hofstede's model was popular, some experts thought his ideas about culture and how it affects people might not be completely right. One main criticism came from Professor Brendan McSweeney. He argued that Hofstede's ideas about national culture were too strong and that his methods might have had problems. Hofstede replied to this, saying that the second edition of his book answered many of McSweeney's points. He felt that the resistance to his ideas meant he was changing how people thought about cross-cultural studies. However, McSweeney still believed the same problems were in the second edition.

Another important point of view came from Professor Barry Gerhart and Professor Meiyu Fang. They said that Hofstede's results only showed that a small part (about 2 to 4 percent) of differences in individual values could be explained by national differences. This meant that most of the differences (96 percent or more) were not explained by national culture. They also said that Hofstede's work didn't really explain how individual people behave.

In 2008, Galit Ailon wrote an article that looked closely at Culture's Consequences. She found some things that didn't quite fit together in Hofstede's ideas and methods. She warned people to be careful and not just accept Hofstede's cultural dimensions without thinking.

Philippe d'Iribarne, a research director in Paris, also had concerns. He felt that a theory of culture that says culture is "shared meaning" doesn't show how things stay together or change. He questioned Hofstede's terms and how he used them. For example, he wondered if "power distance" meant a whole culture's acceptance of power differences, or just how much people accept hierarchy in companies. D'Iribarne also questioned Hofstede's general conclusions, saying that Hofstede might have put his own ideas onto the data. For example, Hofstede thought high stress at work meant low uncertainty avoidance. But d'Iribarne suggested it could also mean high stress because of high uncertainty avoidance, since there are no clear rules in cultures with low uncertainty avoidance.

Finally, d'Iribarne questioned Hofstede's idea that large organizations or whole national cultures are uniform. He said that societies are often split into different groups, and meaning is not just received but also created by people. Hofstede himself agreed that their approaches were different but helpful together. He said, "The two approaches are complementary -- mine is more quantitative, d'Iribarne's more qualitative. I provided a skeleton for the countries he studied, and he provided the flesh."

Other experts also point out a basic issue with how Hofstede's cultural dimensions are often used. Hofstede's scores are for countries as a whole, not for individual people living in those countries. This means you can't make assumptions about individual people based on their country's score. Doing so is called an "ecological fallacy". To avoid this mistake, some suggest not using Hofstede's dimension scores for individual management research or training.

However, in a new study of international value data, Arno Tausch found that Hofstede's value scales matched well with other research results. Especially the dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism vs. Collectivism, Long-Term Orientation, and Indulgence versus Restraint were closely related to value dimensions found by other researchers like Ronald Inglehart.

Archives

The papers and records of Geert Hofstede are kept at the Library of the University of Groningen. They have been open for the public to see since February 2020.

See also

In Spanish: Geert Hofstede para niños