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Diversity in the workforce
Geert Hofstede is the most cited non-American in the field of management in the US Social Science Citation Index.
Although his seminal theories on national cultures were only elaborated and published in the late 1970s/early1980s, Hofstede's inspiration arose from his work in the preceding decade in IBM Europe where he was one of the driving forces behind the creation of IBM's International Employee Opinion Research Program. Over a six-year period, he and his colleagues collected and analyzed more than 100,000 survey questionnaires completed by matched groups of IBM employees in 72 countries around the world.
Hofstede left IBM to become a professor at various international management schools including IMD, Lausanne, INSEAD Fontainebleau, and the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels. It was at this time that he completed his analysis of the IBM employee survey database, leading to his definition of four dimensions of national culture and publication of his influential book Culture's Consequences . In 1980 he co-founded the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC) and in 1985 he accepted a full professorship at Maastricht University where he taught Organizational Anthropology and International Management until 1993. Geert Hofstede has acted as a consultant to national and international business and government organizations including the World Bank, OECD, Asian Productivity Organization and the Commission of the European Union.
How did your ideas on the implications of national culture in the workplace evolve?
This was initially through my work as a psychologist at IBM Europe where I founded and managed the Personnel Research Department. I dealt with people from many different IBM subsidiaries and I was struck by the differences in their behavior.
Our department was not involved in investigating culture at the time - we didn't even use the word - but we did collect various data which led us to observe the different behavior and note the different opinions of people from differing cultural backgrounds. Our department also initiated survey research in the various subsidiaries of IBM and, through this, my colleagues and I came to realize that these behavioral differences could only be accounted for by nationality.
It was only after I had left IBM on a sabbatical and was teaching at IMD in Lausanne in Switzerland...