Hofstede's cultural dimension and software company culture
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Geert Hofstede left us a few days ago (12 February 2020), I dedicate today’s post to this great thinker. His ideas has had a huge impact on our thinking about how a software company should operate, particularly in the cultural context of Bangladesh. We wrote sometime back about Geert’s cultural dimension and its importance for software company and how we at Kaz manage the power distance . In today’s post I’ll revisit some of those concepts and also look at it from a larger perspective.
Geert Hofstede
First a quick intro to the man himself. Born in 1928 he was a Dutch social psychologist who worked in IBM and was also a Professor at Maastricht University. He is well known for his research on cross-cultural groups and organizations culminating on his theory of cultural dimensions. His extensive research resulted in the publication in 1980 of his seminal book Culture’s Consequences. It was written for the academic world and made very controversial theories that challenged the validity of established theories in psychology, organization sociology, and management theory. A 1984 paperback edition of the book left out the base data and the statistics but was otherwise identical to the 1980 hardcover version
Theory of cultural dimension
The theory of cultural dimension is a framework used to understand the differences in culture in different countries of the world and to find out the ways that work is done in different cultures. In other words, the framework is used to distinguish between different national cultures, the dimensions of culture, and their impact for businesses.
The theory is based a study of 117,000 IBM employees. With this very large data set Geert showed that how we operate in a corporate environment is very much dependent on our national culture. And these culture dependent biases lead to business decisions, attitudes and at the end business operations and success. Hence knowing about the cultural dimensions, how to manage those for optimal business performance is of major importance for a business.
Power Distance Index
Of Geert’s cultral dimensions, the concept of power distance index the most important for software companies, we feel. Power distance index (PDI) is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This is what defines how team members feel about voicing there concerns and having a say in the overall business process. As you can understand for a software development team this is the most important thing. If team members cannot voice their issues the overall software team starts becoming an authoritarian environment where the team leaders govern how things are done, what technical decisions are correct and what kind of architecture to follow. This leads to huge bias on technology, making it next to impossible to make software error free. Apart from the obvious effect on the work output the power distance has an important effect overall team culture and happiness. For a creative work such as software development not having the ability and the flexibility to work with your own ideas or getting put into doing things that you feel are incorrect lead to less job satisfaction which eventually leads to bad performance.
I recently found some great info graphics about the cultural dimensions across countries of the world. Here’s the graphics that shows PDI across countries of the world. I can relate with Bangladesh being so high up around the end of the spectrum. This is why we take so many measures to address this issue of high PDI and try to make it low.
