The Role of Cultural Values in Business and Society

For managers or business people visiting a foreign country, understanding national values through surveys like Hofstede’s (1980) can be extremely beneficial. These surveys identify the acceptable values, ideas, and behaviors in a country, which helps avoid offending locals. Hofstede identifies four value dimensions, while the GLOBE survey (House, 2004) identifies nine. Additionally, a country’s cultural values can be inferred from people’s statements about their culture and what is rewarded or punished in various institutions. Values are embedded from the culture in the process of socialization and, once learned, tend to be resistant to change. A society’s institutions carry the culture’s values in their ideologies. Value differences between members of different cultures can lead to misunderstandings and conflict.