"THE DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE: Deeper cultural assumptions about reality and truth" as a topic and subtopic respectively are herein highlighted/ discussed within the tenets of the management academic context of Organizational culture and leadership.

1. Design and presented by
HENRY CHIKE OKONKWO

2.  Groups and organizations evolve and for them to exist
continually, even society, there is need for them to
agree and live with the assumptions as to what
constitutes external adaptation and internal integration.
 They need to ascertain what is real, how to determine
truth or falsity of something, how to measure time,
how space is allocated what human nature is, and how
people should get along with each other.
 Furthermore, different societies have evolved different
answers to questions bordering on the aforementioned
facts and different cultures in the world influence how
groups and organizations within them evolve.

3.  Thus, an individualistic behavior would be taken for
granted in a U.S company, just as teamwork would be
taken for granted in a Japanese company. Even a merger
or a joint venture coming from companies of the two
extreme could be difficult.
 The dimensions to be reviewed in this chapter were
originally developed by Talcott Parson and were later
advance into a set of value dimensions by Kluchhohn
and Strodtbeck in order to do their comparative study of
four cultures in the U.S southwest, namely: Anglo,
Hispanic, Mormon, and Navajo.
 To a larger degree the dimensions overlap such as
those promoted by Hofstede (2001, first published
1980), Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (1993, 2000)
and others. Schein (2004) also adds to the dimensions
and are listed below namely:

4.  The nature of reality and truth: the belief as to what is accepted to
be true and real. How true and reality is determined and discovered.
 The nature of time: the belief as to what constitute lateness and
being present; how time is defined and measured and its importance
to culture.
 The nature of space: how space is allocated; the symbolic meaning
of space and the person; intimacy and privacy.
 The nature of human nature: what it means to be human; the basis
of being human; is the human nature good or evil? Is it neutral? Are
human beings prefect?
 The nature human activity: what are the right things for human
beings to do whether as individuals or as an organization in relating
to their environment. It also addresses what should be the
appropriate level of activity and passivity.
 The nature of human relationships: what is the right way for people
to relate to one another? In what form should people relate one to
another? Cooperatively, competitively, being individualistic,
competitive, collaboratively, or communally. Again, how is power
and love distributed?

5.  The above listed deeper dimensions clearly will influence
how external adaptation and internal integration issues are
handled.
 Furthermore, the above listed deeper dimensions reflects
that for an organization to attain its goals, it got to
determine what constitutes truth, how they treat time,
what is space, and how they value human relationships.
 Again, the measurement system and assumptions of how
to take corrective actions is dependent on the nature of
truth and the appropriate psychological contract for
employees.
 Also, the kind of ideas that borders on measurement
system, corrective actions, language and conceptual
systems, status systems, reward systems, rules for
intimacy can certainly be seen as directly connected to
deeper assumptions about truth, time, and space and
human relationship, human nature and human activity.

6.  When any new group forms, its members will bring with them
cultural assumptions at this deeper level.
 The different background orientation of persons coming
together to form a new group may create for difficulty of
cooperation amongst them, but as members get to know
themselves, they will gradually develop some common
assumptions- somewhat different from member’s original
assumptions.
 It further implies why some joint venture succeeds and some
other fails. E.g is the case of a French HR manager who had to
give up his “frenchness” in order to survive working for DEC (an
American company).
 It is important to understand these assumptions so as to be able
to compare organizations and sub units within the organization,
and to transcend in relating as to comparing it with national and
ethnic culture on a broader scale.

7.  An important part of every culture is a set of assumptions
about what is real and how one determines or discovers what
is real.
 Such assumption tells members of a group how to determine
what are relevant information and how to interpret
information, when to act with it, and what action to take?
 At DEC for instance, reality and truth were defined by debate
and by pragmatic criteria of whether things work. Whereas at
Ciba Geigy much more emphasis was given to research
results from the laboratory and to the opinions of those
considered wise and experienced.
 Even though both companies originate from west, yet, these
disparities exist, thus, portraying a broader cultural context.

8.  External physical reality: this is the level at which things can
be argued out and determined empirically objectively.
 For instances, if two people are arguing about whether or not
a piece of glass will break, they can hit it with a hammer and
find out or where two managers are arguing over which
product to introduce, they can then agree to do a market test
and establish criteria to resolve.
 Different cultures have different assumptions about what
constitutes external physical reality.
 The physical reality of the spirit world in some cultures is
unlike what obtains in other cultures. An experience with an
Indian shaman can be a vivid example.

9.  Social reality: this refers to those things that members of a
group regard as a matter of consensus, that are not
externally, empirically testable.
 If a people believe in something and define it as real, it
becomes real for that group, as sociologists pointed out long
ago.
 In the international context, there is no way to test who is
right about a territorial conflict or a belief system, as the
continuing war in the Middle East has amply demonstrated.
 One of the reasons why business decisions are often difficult
to make and why management is an intrinsically complex
activity is the lack of consensus on whether a given decision
area belongs in the realm of physical or social reality.
 However, consensus has to be reached on the standard at
arriving at a decision and not necessary to on the ultimate
substance of the decision of winning or losing for example.

10.  Individual reality: this refers to the extent a given person has
learned from his or her own experience, which therefore has a
quality of absolute truth to that person.
 Again, what some has come to imbibe as true may not be
revealed to any other person.
 One cannot move forward in life if he cannot clearly articulate his
actual experience.
 As individuals, we must have some kind of consensus on whose
experience to trust; having to become accustomed to a
traditional, lineal society lifestyle or the pragmatic, individualistic
societal concept.
 Most times, it is not possible to objectively define culture without
having to verify and see it from a social point of view that makes
it become the only sound basis for judgment. Else one would be
prone to discomfort and fear if he does not understand what is
happening and how to feel about it.

11.  A useful distinction can be found in Hall’s (1977) differentiation
between what he calls high-context and low context cultures and
Maruyama’s (1974) contrast between unidirectional and mutual
causal cultural paradigms.
 In low-context, unidirectional culture, events have clear universal
meanings. Whereas in high - context, mutual causal cultural
paradigms, events can be understood only in context, meanings
can vary, categories can change, and causality cannot be
understood without difficulties.
 Though this distinction has more meaning when one compares
countries or large ethnic units, it has usefulness for
organizations as well.
 For example, DEC was a high-context culture in which the
meaning of words and actions depended on who was speaking
and under what conditions. By contrast, Ciba Geigy was a low-
context culture in which messages tended to have the same
meaning no matter whom they were coming from.

12.  When we refer to “language”, we often
overlook the role of context, but as we all
know too well from our own cross-cultural
travel experiences, language is embedded in
a wider context in which nonverbal cues, tone
of voice, body language, and other signals
determine the true meaning of what is said.

13.  A useful dimension for comparing groups on their
approach to reality testing is an adaptation of England’s
(1975) moralism –pragmatism scale.
 In his study of managerial values, England found that
managers in different countries tended to be either
pragmatic, seeking validation in their own experience or
moralistic, seeking validation in a general philosophy,
moral system, or tradition.
 He found out that Europeans tended to be more moralistic,
whereas Americans tended to be more pragmatic.
 If we apply this dimension to the basic underlying
assumptions that a group makes we can specify different
bases for defining what is true as shown below:

14. Criteria for determining truth
 Pure dogma, based on tradition and / religion.
 Revealed dogma; i.e. wisdom based on trust in the
authority of wise men, formal leaders, prophets, or kings.
 Truth derived by a “rational- legal“ process (as when we
establish the guilt or innocence of an individual by means
of a legal process that acknowledges from the outset that
there is no absolute truth, only socially determined truth).
 Truth as that which survives conflict and debate.
 Truth as that which works, the purely pragmatic criterion.
 Truth as established by the scientific method, which
becomes, once again, a kind of dogma, especially in the
social sciences, where even the scientific method is a
matter of consensus among social scientists.

15.  This dimension not only highlights the basis on which
truth is determined but also can be related to how to avoid
uncertainties and how to tolerate ambiguity.
 Some researchers argue that higher tolerance levels in
certain managerial areas are associated with more
effectiveness, but those results may apply only in broader
cultural contexts that are more tolerant of and even value
ambiguity.
 For the purpose of analysis, we shouldn’t sweep under the
carpet of the fact that, where there is no unified
underlying assumption by the members of a group, the
group will not evolve as a group in the first place.
 At DEC, reality was defined as pragmatic and the level of
tolerance of ambiguity was high, which is unlike Ciba
Giegy where tolerance of ambiguity did not function well
and even operated much closer to the moralistic end of
the dimension.

16.  How a group test for reality and makes decisions also involves
consensus on what constitutes data, what is information, and
what is knowledge.
 Because of the ongoing revolution in ICT, what might consist as
information to an IT “professional” might not go down well if
applied to senior managers. Thus, requiring that there must be a
degree of consensus on which information is relevant to the task
at hand for a group to make realistic decisions.
 Dougherty’s research on new product development teams
showed that when such groups do not develop a common
definition of relevant information, they are more likely to come
up with products that do not make it in the marketplace
(Dougherty, 1990).
 She identified five separate “thought worlds” that operate in the
functional specialists who are usually brought together in
product development teams.

17.  Each member of the team believes that he or she “knows a
lot” about the team’s customers, but what these members
know turns out to be very different.
 The engineers know just how big the product should be
and some other technical details.
 The manufacturing people know what the potential
volumes are and how many models might be needed.
 Marketers/ business planners know in general whether or
not the market exists, the size of the potential market, the
price and profit level, even the market trend.
 The field salespeople know what the potential customers
will use the product for, what user’s specific are, and how
important the product are to customers relative to
competitors’ products.

18.  The distribution people know how the products will be
sold, what the merchandize plans are and how many
sales channels there will be.
 Until there is the ability for these professionals to come
together and to understand that despite their
differences, there must be a consensus in product
development , they will not succeed in the market place.
 In summary, one of the most important dimensions of
culture is the nature of how reality, truth, and
information are defined.

19.  Schein, E. (2006). Organizational culture and
leadership (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

20. THANK YOU