How has Hofstede’s framework contributed to diversity management as practiced by leaders today?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

key points from the text include: an ambitious effort to measure and quantify the values that distinguish one culture from another along five unified dimensions and a demonstration of the significance of national cultures to management theory and practice; promoted sensitivity to cultural diversity in the workplace at the very time that global businesses were expanding; undermined the assumption that management knowledge that originated in the United States could be universally applied and emphasized the need to learn different cultures and adapt management practices to local values and norms. Hofstede’s body of work has a distinct identity with five major contributions to cross-cultural research: (a) generating a paradigm shift in the study of culture, from treating it as a single (though, admittedly complex) variable to unpackaging culture into independent measurable dimensions; (b) creating cultural dimensions that are meaningful on a national level, underpinned by variables that correlated across nations, not across individuals or organizations; (c) the five dimensions address basic universal problems that all societies have to deal with; (d) the cultural dimensions are thought to reflect stable national differences that, though evolving, remain quite the same, or move in a similar direction as to render them quite consistent over time; (e) the work was based on a very large data set demonstrating the importance and relevance of national culture to organizational behavior, management practices, and to society at large.