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Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1990 by Geert Hofstede, Bram Neuijen, Denise Daval Ohayv, Geert Sanders

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RESULTS

Effects of Organizational Membership

For all 135 survey questions, without exception, unit mean scores differed significantly across the 20 organizational units. However, the 57 questions dealing with values tended to produce smaller differences between units than the 74 questions dealing with perceived practices. The range of mean scores for the group of values questions was from .32 to 2.09 (mean .87); the range for the group of perceived-practices questions was from .68 to 3.22 (mean 1.43). Because most questions were scored on 5-point scales, the mean scores from two units could maximally differ 4.0 points. A difference-of-means test showed that in view of the size of the samples and the standard deviations of the individual scores within these samples, a difference of means over .29 points was sufficient for significance at the .01-level in the most unfavorable case; in all other cases the limit was lower. Even the very lowest mean score range found, .32 for one of the values questions, still indicates a significant difference from the highest to the lowest scoring unit on this question. Most ranges were far over the significance limit (the .001-limit is at .41; all but one range are over this level).

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The earlier cross-national study (Hofstede, 1980: 72) included analyses of variance (ANOVAs) for ten values questions across ten countries. (2) The same ten questions were also subjected to ANOVAs across the twenty organizational units in this study. Eighteen practices questions that we had identified as being key questions for determining the practices dimensions were subjected to similar ANOVAs.

The F-values shown in Table 1 are a measure of the variance explained by the criterion (county or organization). Again, all but one are significant at the .001-level. For the questions on values, country differences explain more variance than organization differences for any single question studied; for organizations, questions on practices have almost twice as much variance explained as questions on values.

Our first hypothesis was thus supported. Membership in an organization does explain a significant share of the variance in the answers by members for all 131 culture questions used in the survey. However, we found an unpredicted difference between questions dealing with values and questions dealing with perceived practices: the latter produced a much wider range of answers across organizations that the former. In the earlier research on national culture differences, the questions selected from the data bank because they discriminated among countries dealt almost exclusively with values. Where the same questions about values appeared in both studies, across countries and across organizations, the ANOVAs across countries explained a much larger share of the variance than the ANOVAs across organizations, although even across organizations the variances in answers on questions about values stayed above the significance level.

Business Services Industry

Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1990 by Geert Hofstede, Bram Neuijen, Denise Daval Ohayv, Geert Sanders

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