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

In the second phase, we administered a standardized survey questionnaire consisting of 135 precoded questions to a random sample from the unit, consisting of about 25 managers, 25 college-level nonmanagers ("professionals") and 25 non-college-level nonmanagers ("others"). Altogether, 1,295 usable questionnaires were collected, or an average of 65 per unit. About 60 of the questions in the survey were taken from the earlier cross-national study and its later extensions; the remaining questions, with a few exceptions, were developed on the basis of the interviews and were directed at the issues that the interviewers found to differ substantially between units. These included, in particular, many perceptions of daily practices, which had been almost entirely missing in the cross-national studies. The results of the interviews and of the surveys were discussed with the management of the units and were sometimes fed back to larger groups of unit members, if management chose to do so.

In the third phase, we used questionnaires, followed by personal interviews, to collect data at the level of the unit as a whole on such factors as its total employee strength, budget composition, key historical facts, or the demographics of its key managers. The first author collected all unit-level data personally, since finding out what comparable data could meaningfully be collected from such a varied set of organizations was a heuristic process difficult to share across researchers. The informants for the unit-level data were the top manager, the chief personnel officer, and the chief budget officer.

Interviews. The checklist used for the in-depth interviews was based on a survey of the literature on the ways in which organization cultures are supposed to manifest themselves and on our own ideas. We classified manifestations of culture into four categories: symbols, heroes, rituals, and values, as shown in Figure 1.

Symbols are words, gestures, pictures, or objects that carry a particular meaning within a culture. Heroes are persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics highly prized in the culture and who thus serve as models for behavior (Wilkins, 1984). Rituals are collective activities that are technically superfluous but are socially essential within a culture--they are therefore carried out for their own sake. In Figure 1, we have drawn these as the successive skins of an onion--from shallow, superficial symbols to deeper rituals. Symbols, heroes, and rituals can be subsumed under the term "practices," because they are visible to an observer although their cultural meaning lies in the way they are perceived by insiders. The core of culture, according to Figure 1, is formed by values, in the sense of broad, nonspecific feelings of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal, rational and irrational--feelings that are often unconscious and rarely discussable, that cannot be observed as such but are manifested in alternatives of behavior. We selected these four terms from the terminology offered in the literature (e.g., Deal and Kennedy, 1982), because we believe them to be (1) mutually exclusive and (2) reasonably comprehensive, thus covering the field rather neatly.