GB526 Unit 2 Cultural Analysis Example

What Hofstede and GLOBE Predict for a Design Office in Campinas, and What They Miss: A Unit 2 Cultural Analysis

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Purdue University Global

GB526: Global Management and Leadership

Unit 2 Cultural Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The engineering firm, the acquired office and the interview findings are composite; the published country scores and sources cited are real.

The Acquisition

Northbay Engineering, a composite Toronto firm of about 600 people, designs water and wastewater treatment plants. It has bought Projeta Engenharia, a forty-person design office in Campinas, to serve clients in Latin America and to add design capacity for Canadian projects. Toronto project managers will now lead mixed teams, with design reviews, schedules and client changes shared across both offices. Before the first joint project, Northbay's operations director asked what to expect.

Exhibit 1: Hofstede Dimensions

Hofstede's published country scores, where a higher figure means more of the named quality, compare as follows (Hofstede et al., 2010):

Power distance: Canada 39; Brazil 69.

Individualism: Canada 80; Brazil 38.

Uncertainty avoidance: Canada 48; Brazil 76.

Long-term orientation: Canada 36; Brazil 44.

On these figures, Brazil is more hierarchical, more collective, more anxious about ambiguity and somewhat more future-oriented than Canada. The largest gaps are in individualism and power distance.

Exhibit 2: GLOBE Practices and Values

The GLOBE study asked middle managers to describe how things are in their societies, called practices, and how they should be, called values, on a seven-point scale (House et al., 2004).

Power distance: Brazil practices 5.33, values 2.35; English-speaking Canada practices 4.82, values 2.70.

Uncertainty avoidance: Brazil practices 3.60, values 4.99; English-speaking Canada practices 4.58, values 4.75.

For Brazil, values run opposite to practices on both dimensions. Brazilian managers described their society as highly hierarchical but wanted much less hierarchy, and described it as low in rules and predictability but wanted much more of both.

On uncertainty avoidance the two frameworks disagree outright: Hofstede scores Brazil far above Canada, while GLOBE's practice scores put Brazil well below it.

The disagreement is partly a matter of method. Hofstede's score was built from questions about stress and rule orientation among employees; GLOBE's practice score asks how orderly and predictable society is. Javidan et al. (2006) argue that GLOBE's split between practices and values lets managers see both what people experience and what they would welcome, which is useful here: Brazilian engineers may value clear plans precisely because they cannot count on them elsewhere.

Three Situations and What the Frameworks Predict

Design reviews. With high power distance, the frameworks predict that junior Campinas engineers will hesitate to challenge a senior Toronto engineer's design in a meeting, and that problems will surface late or through private channels.

Schedules and planning. Hofstede's high uncertainty avoidance predicts a preference for detailed plans and clear procedures. GLOBE's low practice score predicts experience with plans that slip, alongside a strong wish for better ones.

Client changes. Lower individualism and higher power distance predict that decisions on client changes will be referred upward to the office's director, and that relationships with the client will carry great weight in how changes are handled.

Testing the Predictions

Northbay's integration lead interviewed twelve Campinas engineers and three Toronto managers who had worked on a pilot project. The findings were mixed.

Design reviews: partly confirmed. Junior engineers rarely challenged Toronto seniors in large video meetings, but they challenged freely in small working sessions with their own office's senior engineers present. The deciding factor was the setting, not hierarchy alone.

Schedules: confirmed in the GLOBE direction. Engineers described client schedules in Brazil as often unreliable and said they welcomed Northbay's detailed project plans. They did not show the anxiety that Hofstede's score might suggest; they showed practiced flexibility combined with a wish for more structure.

Client changes: not confirmed. Projeta's engineers had handled client changes directly for years under a founder who delegated widely. They expected to keep doing so and were surprised when a Toronto manager asked them to route changes through him.

What the Frameworks Miss

Three things the national scores could not show mattered most.

Organizational culture. Projeta's founder had built a flat, informal office. The national power distance score described Brazil, not this firm.

The acquisition itself. Engineers worried about job security and whether their methods would be replaced. Some behavior that looked cultural, such as caution in large meetings with Toronto, also reflected uncertainty about the new owners.

Individual and generational differences. Several younger engineers had studied abroad or worked for multinational clients and moved easily between styles.

Osland and Bird (2000) warn against sophisticated stereotyping, using dimension scores as if they described every individual. Their advice is to treat national generalizations as first hypotheses and revise them through contact, which is what the interviews did.

How the Toronto Managers Saw It

The three Toronto managers' accounts added a further layer. Two described the Campinas engineers as reluctant to raise problems, which matched the frameworks' prediction. But when asked for examples, both described large video calls in which Toronto staff did most of the talking and the agenda left little room for questions. The third manager, who had visited Campinas twice, described the same engineers as direct and quick to point out errors in small sessions. The difference lay less in the Brazilians than in how the meetings were run and how well the managers knew the people involved. The frameworks predicted a behavior; the managers' own habits helped produce it.

This matters for Northbay because its managers will read Campinas behavior through whatever expectations they bring. If they expect deference, they may design meetings that invite it and then take the result as confirmation.

Recommendations for Northbay

Hold design reviews in two stages: small working sessions in each office first, then a joint review where findings are presented by teams rather than individuals. Share detailed project plans and treat the Campinas office's experience with unreliable schedules as an asset in planning contingencies. Keep Projeta's practice of delegating client changes to engineers, with clear limits on cost and schedule impact, rather than imposing Toronto's routing. Finally, repeat the interviews after six months, since the acquisition's effects on behavior will fade as trust develops.

Conclusion

Hofstede and GLOBE gave Northbay useful questions about hierarchy, structure and relationships. GLOBE's distinction between practices and values proved more useful than a single score, and the frameworks' disagreement on uncertainty avoidance was a warning not to rely on either alone. The interviews showed that the firm, the acquisition and the individuals mattered as much as the country. The frameworks are best used as a place to start asking.

References

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Sage.

Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., de Luque, M. S., & House, R. J. (2006). In the eye of the beholder: Cross cultural lessons in leadership from Project GLOBE. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(1), 67-90. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2006.19873410

Osland, J. S., & Bird, A. (2000). Beyond sophisticated stereotyping: Cultural sensemaking in context. Academy of Management Perspectives, 14(1), 65-77. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.2000.2909840