Hofstede Insights: compare national cultures before you enter a market

The site: Hofstede Insights Country Comparison tool. Cost: Free. Useful for: culture and countries.

What it is

The Country Comparison tool from Hofstede Insights shows how countries score on the six dimensions of Geert Hofstede’s model of national culture, which the firm calls the 6-D Model. You pick one or several countries and see their scores side by side.

The original dimensions came from a large survey of IBM employees carried out from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Long-term orientation was added after work by Michael Harris Bond, and indulgence was added in 2010. The six are power distance, individualism, motivation towards achievement and success (once called masculinity), uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation and indulgence.

Use it for

• Preparing for a market entry discussion where buying habits or management style may differ from home
• Briefing a team before it works with colleagues, suppliers or clients in another country
• Framing questions for customer interviews, for example about attitudes to risk or hierarchy
• Teaching or revising cross-cultural management with a concrete, visual comparison

The tool is best at the start of a project, when you want a structured list of things that might be different. It is weaker as evidence for a final decision.

How to use it

1. Open the Country Comparison tool on the Hofstede Insights website.
2. Type the first country into the search field and select it.
3. Add one or more further countries to compare against the first.
4. Read the scores dimension by dimension and note where the gap between countries is widest.
5. Turn the widest gaps into questions to test with local contacts, customers or desk research, rather than treating them as answers.

Keep the comparison small. Two or three countries are easier to read than eight, and the point is to find the few differences that matter for your decision.

Example

Say a UK founder is planning to sell a business service in India. Comparing the United Kingdom with India puts the two countries’ scores for all six dimensions side by side. A wide gap on power distance would prompt an early question about who signs off a purchase and how involved senior people expect to be, which can then be checked in real sales conversations.

Watch out for

• The scores are national averages. They say nothing reliable about any one person or company.
• The model has well-known critics, including a widely cited 2002 critique by McSweeney, and later scholars have questioned the original sample and the level of analysis.
• The two newer dimensions rest on thinner data, so treat small differences between countries as noise.

It works well alongside World Bank Open Data, Our World in Data and Customer interviews in the target market.