Changes in Russian managerial values: at test of the convergence hypothesis?
Analyse the cross cultural management issues which arise when American-educated Russian managers and locally-educated Russian workers work together.
Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values. (Kluckhohn, 1951, p.86, n. 5 )
Hofstede suggest that culture manifest itself in four forms:
Symbols, heroes, rituals and values, often presented in famous onion diagram.
Symbols are the worlds, gestures, pictures or objects that carry a particular leaning which is only recognised by those who share the culture.
Heroes are persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics highly prized in a culture, and who thus serve as models fro behaviour.
Nicole van Hooij teaching about cultural dimension...
de Hofstede
Bochum Lage Stadtteil HofstedeRitual are collective activities, technically superfluous in reaching desired ends, but which, within a culture, are considered as socially essential: they are therefore carried out for their own sake.
Symbols, heroes and ritual are practices which are visible to an outside observer; however, their cultural meaning can only be appreciated by a cultural insider.
The cultural core is formed by values, that is, a tendency to prefer certain states of affairs to others.
Values are among the first things that children learn-not consciously, but implicitly. Development psychologists believe that by the age of 10, most children have their basic value system firmly in place, and after that age, changes are difficult to make. Because they were acquired so early our lives, many values remain unconscious to those who hold them. Therefore they can not be discussed, nor can they be directly observed by outsiders. The can only be inferred from...