Introduction
Culture is an important criterion for organisations to determine their strategies of management and leadership. This essay aims to outline Hofstede’s cross-cultural framework, identify similarities and differences in comparison with the Chinese Value Survey (CVS) and discuss how differences in individualism-collectivism and long-term/short-term orientation among employees could affect management and leadership. The finding is that Hofstede’s framework and CVS differ from cultural background and respondents; oppositely, the countries researched and outcomes are similar, and parts of the contents are related. The essay also suggests that individualism-collectivism and long-term/short-term orientation would influence motivation, leadership style, rewarding system and supervision respectively. The following parts will present outline and comparison first in addition to analysis of influence of individualism-collectivism followed by LTO-STO, and finally the conclusion.
Discussion of the Issues
Outline and comparison
Hofstede’s cross-cultural framework described five dimensions: power distance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term versus short-term orientation (LTO-STO) (Migliore 2011). Power distance is defined as the extent of willingness that societies accept the hierarchical power structure (Morrison 2006). Individualism means individuals detect themselves as autonomous (Morrison, 2006); contrary, collectivism represents that individuals remain integrated into groups (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005). The third dimension is masculinity-femininity, which demonstrates clearly distributed and overlapped gender-roles separately (Migliore 2011). Uncertainty avoidance measures how the members of a culture cope with uncertainties in daily life (Morrison 2006). The last dimension, LTO-STO, is people’s time epistemology which is highly distinguished between western and eastern culture (Morrison 2006). LTO