BUSI 303 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 1 Thread: Power Distance and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions

BUSI 303 International Business, Discussion Board Forum 1 Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The thread follows the course's key-term format; the textbook and the three articles cited are real, and textbook locations are given by chapter.

Key Term

Power distance is the dimension of Hofstede's cultural framework that describes how a society handles the fact that people are unequal in physical and intellectual capabilities; in high power distance cultures, inequalities of power and wealth are accepted and allowed to grow over time, while low power distance cultures try to reduce them (Hill & Hult, 2018, ch. 4).

Article Summary

Taras et al. (2010) combined nearly six hundred studies, involving more than two hundred thousand individuals, that measured Hofstede's cultural values and related them to outcomes at work. Culture showed up in commitment to the employer, in attitudes toward teamwork and in willingness to seek feedback, and it mattered more for how people felt and saw things than for how well they performed. They also found that cultural values differed substantially among individuals within the same country, and that national averages explained only part of how a given person behaved.

Connection to the Key Term

The meta-analysis gives a manager two lessons about power distance. First, the dimension matters: in high power distance settings, employees are more likely to expect direction from supervisors and to hesitate before questioning them, which affects how feedback, participation and teamwork work. A supervisor moving from a low power distance country such as the United States to a high power distance country such as Malaysia may find that an open-door policy draws few visitors, not because employees have nothing to say but because walking in uninvited feels inappropriate. A participative style that signals respect in one country can signal weak leadership in another.

Second, Taras et al. (2010) caution against treating a national score as a description of every person. Within any country, individuals vary widely, so a manager should use power distance as a starting hypothesis about how people may respond and then learn about the actual team. An earlier review of 180 Hofstede-based studies by Kirkman et al. (2006) likewise urged researchers and managers to look beyond country averages. Hill and Hult (2018) make a similar point when they warn that Hofstede's work describes national tendencies and can encourage stereotypes if applied too literally. Ghemawat (2001) adds that cultural distance is one of several kinds of distance, along with administrative, geographic and economic distance, that make foreign markets harder to serve than they first appear.

References

Ghemawat, P. (2001). Distance still matters: The hard reality of global expansion. Harvard Business Review, 79(8), 137-147.

Hill, C. W. L., & Hult, G. T. M. (2018). Global business today (10th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Kirkman, B. L., Lowe, K. B., & Gibson, C. B. (2006). A quarter century of Culture's Consequences: A review of empirical research incorporating Hofstede's cultural values framework. Journal of International Business Studies, 37(3), 285-320. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400202

Taras, V., Kirkman, B. L., & Steel, P. (2010). Examining the impact of Culture's Consequences: A three-decade, multilevel, meta-analytic review of Hofstede's cultural value dimensions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(3), 405-439. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018938