In the Jungle

I started to re-read Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behavior, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations this weekend. I am not entirely sure why I pulled this out of my bookshelf; I think it had something to do with avoiding my dissertation and having finished every one of Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghost’s novels. After the first few pages, I marveled at the clarity Hofstede employed to communicate a few of organizational science’s more important concepts.

Since these concepts are so critical to what we do, both in the employee survey business and in organizational science in general, I thought it would be a good idea to reproduce and discuss some of them here. Maybe this will prompt others to try their hand at the book itself; it’s not a light read, but it isn’t particularly difficult either.

On Behavioral Prediction:

Let’s face it, this is what we do. All of us, whether we are in HR, management, organizational development, academia, whatever- we are all trying to predict some aspect of human behavior. In employee engagement circles, we try to predict the consequences of engagement (or lack thereof) on productivity, innovation, and ultimately organizational success. In training circles, we at least implicitly understand that certain levels of knowledge/skills predict human performance (and ultimately organizational success). In HR, we predict that increasing employee benefit quality has a certain impact on their decisions to remain employed with your organization (and again, ultimately organizational success). I guess the message here is that predicting human behavior serves to predict at least a portion of organizational success. Here is what Hofstede has to say about this:

Social systems can exist only because human behavior is not random, but to some extent predictable. I predict that Mrs. X will be in the office at 8:25 A.M. tomorrow; that the taxi driver will take me to the station and not somewhere else if I ask him; that all members of the family will come if I ring the dinner bell. We make such predictions continuously, and the vast majority of them are so banal that they pass completely unnoticed. But for each prediction of behavior, we try to take both the person and the situation into account. We assume that each person parries a certain amount of mental programming that is stable over time and lead to the same person’s showing more or less the same behavior in similar situations… the more accurately we know a person’s mental programming and the situation, the more sure our prediction will be.

On Measurement:

Most of what we do revolves around measurement or estimation of some employee or organizational characteristic. Many times we measure employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, organizational safety climate, or executive leadership capacity/approach. Unlike many other sciences, our measures are indirect. We cannot scoop out an employee’s job satisfaction and weigh it (I suppose taking it out wouldn’t be as much of a problem as putting it back in). We also cannot unfurl our organization’s teamwork orientation and put it next to our yardstick (is this called a meter stick in the rest of the world?).

Hofstede has quite a bit to say about this, but I will limit myself to the few things (I have read so far) that my audience might find interesting:

It is possible that our mental programming, our ‘software of the mind’ (the subtitle of my 1991 book), is physically determined by states of our brain cells. Nevertheless, we cannot directly observe mental programs. All we can observe is behavior: words and deeds. When we observe behavior, we infer from it the presence of stable mental software. This type of inference is not unique to social sciences; it exists, for example, in physics, where the intangible concept of “forces” is inferred from its manifestations in the movement of objects. Like forces in physics, mental programs are intangibles, and the terms we use to describe them are constructs. A construct is a product of our imagination, supposed to help our understanding. Constructs do not “exist” in an absolute sense- we define them into existence.

Hofstede also introduces the concept of operationalization, which is so critical to virtually all aspects of mental measurement:

In empirical research, we look for measures of the constructs that describe mental program; that is we have to operationalize them. We need to find observable phenomena from which constructs can be inferred. In some types of research our operationalization leads to quantitative measures; in other types, to descriptive, qualitative measures. Whichever we aim for, any strategy for measuring mental programs has to use forms of behavior or outcomes of behavior.