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Introduction
Hofstede's (1980; 2001) model of national culture has been enormously popular in the field of cross-cultural management and international business, as well as in cross-cultural psychology. Although he significantly scaled down his publishing activities at the end of his life, his annual citation rate in Scopus kept growing, reaching 1,095 in 2019 alone and yielding a personal annual impact factor of 13.35 in 2019. Decades ago, Peterson (2003) explained Hofstede’s popularity: his first book had shaped the basic themes, structures and controversies of the cross-cultural field for the next 20 years. Endorsements of Hofstede's model in the academic literature have been far more common than criticisms. The latter (for instance McSweeney, 2002; Baskerville, 2003) have often been based on debatable theoretical considerations rather than solid empirical findings. Some critical publications, such as Project GLOBE's main book (House et al., 2004) report empirical analyses, yet some of their conceptualizations and operationalizations of dimensions inspired by Hofstede's differed significantly from his originals and cannot be considered attempts at replications. Two recent studies (Minkov, 2018; Beugelsdijk and Welzel, 2018) searched for close empirical equivalents of Hofstede's dimensions and reported negative results for some of them. Both articles have generated considerable interest: the first has been cited 45 times in Scopus journals in less than two years, whereas the second has been the most read article in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology since its publication in 2018. However, unlike Hofstede's methodology, neither of those two studies focuses on work-related issues. Thus, we still cannot fully reject the hypothesis that although the original Hofstede model does not replicate when researchers focus on general societal issues, it may replicate if we focused on work-related issues.
Goal, originality and contribution of the present study
Our goal is to attempt an empirical replication of Hofstede's model based on his approach, which focuses on work-related issues. This makes our study quite original, as no such close replication has been attempted so far across nationally representative samples from a large number of countries.
There is an obvious need for a study of this kind in view of the polemic nature of Hofstede's model. Polemic issues need to be addressed rather than adjudicated on the basis of tradition and faith. However, despite the mounting...