In the late 1970s, Hofstede sent questionnaires to tens of thousands of IBM employees in dozens of countries. Because the jobs were similar across the world, Hofstede claimed that differences between the answers of the employees were likely due to the culture of the country they lived and worked in.
His "onion" is similar to Luthans and Doh's (2012) concentric circles seen in the previous post. As Hofstede (2005, p. 8) put it in his book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, "The core of culture [as seen in the figure] is formed by values. Values are broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others": good over evil; clean over dirty; beautiful over ugly; rational over emotional... and so forth.
And these circles go on at many levels of analysis: from as large as the entire nation all the way trhough many social settings and down to the family. As Hofstede describes it, any person or group's values, rituals, heros, and symbols, and practices involve different levels: national, regional/ethic, gender, generation, social class, and organizational, including family. Therefore, the way I dressed as a child reflected how I was a citizen of USA, an Irish-Catholic, a female, born in 1953, to a first-generation college graduate (law school was two years of college at the time my dad got his degree), and to my particular parents.
Here I am in second grade in my first communion dress. For us, white symbolizes purity. This is not true for all cultures. In some Asian cultures, white symbolizes death.
So, admitting there are MANY levels of influence on persons, Hofstede directed his focus to how the national level has similar values among citizens. Further, he sought to establish that countries can be compared and contrasted in terms of only a few values. These values he calls his dimensions. Here is one of the dimensions, Power Distance, and how the countries compare in terms of how much it is considered valuable for some people to have a lot more authority than others.
http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/to-tell-or-not-to-tell/
According to your book (Luthans and Doh, 2012, pp. 116-118), the four main dimensions that Hofstede found to be consistently important to different degrees between different countries are the following: Power Distance high versus low (PDI), Uncertainty Avoidance high versus low, Individualism versus Collectivism, and Masculinity versus Femininity. Another dimension he looked at was short-term versus long-term time orientation.
Here is a chart comparing different countries: (https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/isdyahoofellow/using-geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions-to-study-social-media-usage-in-bric-countries/)
Please take a minute and consider that the World (blue bar line) is an average. So, too, is each of the country's scores. Individual respondents varied; however, the average has been relatively consistent for several researchers over several decades.
Please look, too, at the IDV dimension--the second from the right along the x axis--for the USA. See how very tall its bar is compared to the other countries? That is how extreme the USA values are in terms of assuming that power comes from individual effort rather than from collective support. Therefore, the next post tries to explore the relatively underdeveloped USA value around collectivism: "The tendency of people to belong to groups or collectives and to look after each other in exchange for loyalty" (Luthans and Doh, 2012, p. 117).
This is a photo of my high school social friendship group welcoming me back from fall 1971 semester abroad in Spain. My sister Sue is dressed in her Catholic grade school uniform and holding the sign (She was the one in tears in the family Easter photo).
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