ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

7DEEPER CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONSABOUT REALITY AND TRUTHAs groups and organizations evolve, the assumptions they developabout external adaptation and internal integration reflect deeperassumptions about more abstract general issues around which humansneed consensus in order to have any kind of society at all. Ifwe cannot agree on what is real, how to determine the truth or falsityof something, how to measure time, how space is allocated,what human nature is, and how people should get along with eachother, society is not possible in the first place.But different societies have evolved different answers to thesequestions; hence we have many different cultures in the world, andthese broader cultures influence how groups and organizations withinthem will evolve. Thus individualistic competitive behavior wouldbe taken for granted in a U.S. company, just as teamwork would betaken for granted in a Japanese company. It is when one examinesthe formation of groups that are initially multinational, such ascross-national mergers like that of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler orjoint ventures between companies from different countries, that onesees how disagreement on this higher level of abstraction can makegroup formation and performance extremely difficult.The dimensions to be reviewed in this and the chapters thatfollow are based on concepts originally developed by the sociologistTalcott Parsons (1951) and were evolved into a set of value dimensionsby Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) in order to do theirclassic comparative study of four cultures in the U.S. Southwest—Anglo, Hispanic, Mormon, and Navajo. To varying degrees thesedimensions overlap others, such as those promoted by Hofstede137