A multi-faceted tool for international companies and the intercultural workforce

The Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ is derived from the work of Dr. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch social scientist who developed this questionnaire to illustrate culturally dependent work preferences. He is Director (Emeritus) of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC) at the University of Limburg at Maastricht, the Netherlands. Dr. Hofstede's pioneering study of IBM affiliates in fifty countries, elaborated in his book Culture's Consequences, helped to form the foundation of the field of comparative management. A number of questions in the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ were designed and researched by Dr. Hofstede's colleague, Professor André Laurent, Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD.

You will find a sample iteration of the CW™ here as an Acrobat-PDF-file(312KB).

The most important use of the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ is learning your own cultural profile and how that might compare to others. Responses to the questionnaire help to illuminate attitudes and values, and provide a springboard to understanding and discussion of cultural differences and similarities.

The dimensions, as described and interpreted in the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™, are:

Individualism:The degree of individual or group orientation.
Power Distance: The level of preference for equality or inequality within groups.
Certainty: The preference for risk versus structure.
Achievement: The relative degrees of relationship versus task orientation. This dimension also tracks the relative masculine and feminine influences in the workplace.

The insights are then built upon to create more effective and productive cross-cultural working relationships. Global businesses are constantly building bridges across cultural and other boundaries in order to carry out their work more effectively and productively. Knowing your own profile will help you learn about others and build those bridges together.

The CW™ can be applied to all tasks and forms of intercultural training.

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