Research Article
Limitations and Alternatives to the Cultural Dimension Measurement Method of Tang and Koveos (2008)
1 Kangwon National University
Published: January 2017 · Vol. 46, No. 2 · pp. 429-454
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2017.46.2.429
Full Text
Abstract
Cultural indices developed by Hofstede have utilized during the past 30 years in the international management by providing solutions facing the internalization such as knowledge transfer, information sharing, personnel management. In addition to these benefits, a question whether the indicators adequately reflect the environmental changes also has raised. Typically Tang and Koveos(2008) tried to update Hofstede’s cultural indices for 90s based on the findings that Hofstede’s cultural indices are highly correlated to economic prosperity. However we found that Tang and Koveos(2008)’s methodology only considers the crosssectional sensitivity which does not include time-series sensitivity in the framework between cultural indices and economic developments. Thus, it leads that global economic changes have not counted in the model, so that it can not appropriately updated the cultural indices. Our updated indices that control times-series sensitivity not only solved a problem that Tang and Koveos(2008)’s indices exceed the original scale, but also show higher correlation with GLOBE than Tang and Koveos(2008)’s indices. Furthermore Hofstede indices updated by our methodology offsets a dilemma between Hofstede and GLOBE, then it supports Brewer and Venaik(2011)’s hypothesis of cultural changes corresponding to economic prosperities. At the same time, it confirms to renewal Hofstede indices rather than comparing indices measured under heterogeneous circumstances. Academic contributions of this paper are as follows. First, while Tang and Koveos(2008) limits to single factor changing cultural dimension, this study identify that the effect of economic development could be divided into two elements : cross-sectional sensitivity and time-series sensitivity. Secondly, as applying methodology presented by this study, global costs that remeasure cultural indices could drastically be reduced and yearly tendency of the indices can be measured.
