Our services
InCultures provides tailored in-house and online training, consultation and coaching for managers, leaders and teams operating in international business or in multicultural organizations. Our aim is to lift your success rate in your cross-cultural business.
We help solve your cultural challenges by offering services based on scientific research, evidence, proven tools and our decades long practical business experience. Some examples of our topics :
Cultural Competence for Global Business Leaders
- Global mindset building
- Global virtual management
- Cross-cultural team leadership
- Cross-cultural marketing
- Cross-cultural trust building
Country specific cultural trainings and consultation for managers and leaders of local teams:
- Finland
- Russia
- Kazakhstan
- Ukraine
- Belarus
We also work with a broad network of consultants globally, so ask for specific topics or country.
Cultural Competence for Exporters
Export Management and Development Cross-culturally:
- Sales channel support
- Culturally intelligent export sales process
- Partnership and relationship building
- Negotiations for exporters
Country specific cultural trainings and consultation for exporters:
- Finland
- Russia
- Kazakhstan
- Ukraine
- Belarus
We also work with a broad network of consultants globally, so ask for specific topics or country.
Culture Transformation for Organizations
Facilitation of organizational culture transformation process:
- Organizational culture scan by Hofstede Insights
- Change management consultation
We use proven, science-based tools and models to build practical solutions for your benefit:
- The Hofstede 6D Model introducing the often missed value level of cultural differences
- The 7 Mental Images of National Cultures Model, showing how the Hofstede dimensions interact in combinations globally
- Organizational Culture Scan Tool to measure the problem areas hindering your organization from reaching its strategic goals.
- Global Disc to leverage personality type and cultural differences for high-performing team building at home and globally
Contact us to discuss your challenge and we will tailor a suitable solution to tackle your cross-cultural business issue!
Hofstede 6D model
The Hofstede 6 D model (six dimensions of national culture) is based on extensive research started in the 1980’s by Professor Geert Hofstede and validated repeatedly after that. The model is one of the most known and validated research based tools for managing cultural differences in the world. It is a tool for all managers and individuals working internationally to understand how culture drives people’s behavior.
Today it is applied as a lean, practical, applicable system for managing cultural differences.
The model gives ‘common language with numerical scoring’ to what drives people’s average behavior in different countries. It helps us to design ways to bridge the differences and perform better in international encounters and business.
The six independent dimensions:
1. Power Distance (PDI) or attitude towards hierarchy:
Power Distance expresses the degree to which the less powerful members of a society accept and expect that power isdistributed unequally.
People in societies exhibiting high Power Distance accept a hierarchical order in which everybody has a place and nofurther justification is needed. Status is not achieved but ascribed. Status is expected to be shown by status symbols and age is respected.
In societies with low Power Distance scores, people strive to equalise the distribution of power and demand justification forany inequalities of power. People with power and status will strive to look less powerful and try to look and behave like ‘one of us’.
In societies that have a low score on this dimension, one can say that hierarchy is there only for convenience, delegation of decision making is natural, people are used to working in matrix and those lower down in an organisation expect to beconsulted, to take responsibility and to make decisions of their own job and performance. The ideal leader is a facilitator who consults and coordinates.
In societies with high Power distance, hierarchy is an expression of existential inequalities that are just part of life. Decisionmaking is centralised to the top and the rest of the organisation is expected to execute and not question or take own initiative. It is considered normal that the higher up in the organisation one is, the more special privileges one has. The ideal leader is autocratic, but well-meaning for the organisation.
2. Individualism versus Collectivism (IDV) or attitude towards groups
The higher side of this dimension, Individualism, can be defined as a preference for a loosely-knit social framework, inwhich individuals are raised to take care of themselves and their immediate families.
The lower side of the dimension, Collectivism, represents a preference for a tightly-knit social framework, in whichindividuals belong to ‘in-groups’ and can expect their relatives or members of a particular in-group to look after them inexchange for unquestioning loyalty.
A society’s score on this dimension is reflected in whether people’s self-image is defined in terms of ‘I’ or ‘we’.
Communication tends to be more explicit and direct in individualist countries, whereas in collectivist countries, implicit communication style prevails requiring reading between the lines.
In individualist societies, people tend to prioritise the successful execution of a task or a contract over developing and maintaining relationships. On the opposite end, in collectivist societies, developing and maintaining relationships comesfirst and the successful execution of tasks comes second.
3. Masculinity versus Femininity (MAS) or attitude towards motivation 20
Masculinity stands for societies in which the dominant values are achievement, measurable performance, material rewards and status to show success. Winners are admired . Society at large is more competitive. Status is obtained through success. In these societies,although it is more and more acceptable for women to be assertive, tough and focused on material success, it is generallyNOT acceptable for men to be modest, tender and concerned with quality of life. There is strong emphasis on live to work.
Femininity on the contrary side of the scale stand for societies in which the dominant values are softer: high quality of life, not showing off, caring for others, preference for cooperation rather than competition, seeking consensus. People show sympathy for the less unfortunate. Both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender and concerned with the quality of life. These societies will tend to havestrong social support networks, social security systems, generous parental leave provisions for both parents, and a workto live ethic.
4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) or attitude towards uncertainty
The uncertainty avoidance dimension expresses the degree to which the members of a society feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.
The fundamental issue here is how a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known:
should we try to control the future or just let it happen?
Countries exhibiting high uncertainty avoidance scores maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour, and are intolerant ofunorthodox behaviour and ideas. There is higher need for rules and formality to structure life. Competence and expertiseare highly valued.
Societies with low uncertainty avoidance scores maintain a more relaxed attitude, in which practice counts more thanprinciples. People tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative.
5. Long Term Orientation (LTO) or attitude towards time
Every society has to maintain some links with its own past while dealing with the challenges of the present and the future. Societies prioritize these two existential goals differently.
Societies who have a low score on this dimension prefer to maintain time-honoured traditions and norms, while viewingsocietal change with suspicion.
Those with a culture which scores highly, on the other hand, take a more pragmatic approach – they encourage thrift andefforts in modern education as a way to prepare for the future. In a business context, this dimension is referred to as (short term) normative versus (long term) pragmatic.
6. Indulgence versus Restraint (IND) or attitude towards happiness
A high indulgence score stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drivesrelated to enjoying life and having fun. A lower score stands for a society that suppresses the gratification of needs andregulates it by means of strict social norms.
If you are interested in understanding how the separate dimensions work in combinations, see the 7 Mental Images of National Cultures.
7 Mental Images (7MI) of National Cultures
The unique Mental Images Model was developed by a Dutch management consultant Huib Wursten to demonstrate the effects of combining the first four dimensions of the Hofstede Model and thereby producing something new, a Gestalt (Quoting Aristotle, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”).
During his years of working with multinational organizations and customers like IMF, IBM worldwide, Vodaphone, 3M, ABN Amro-Bank, JP Morgan Chase, he realized that it was often not possible to explain situations and behaviors via using individual dimensions. Also, country-by-country analysis is often too much for people working truly globally. In most cases they need a simple and more comprehensive view of the implications of culture to their work.
First of all, the 7MI model was developed on the basis of the first 4 dimensions of Hofstede’s model. In practice, the Hofstede model and the 7MI model are mutually dependent. The 7MI model can only be understood by the consequences of the scores on Hofstede’s four empirically tested main dimensions, but it complements and gives full understanding of how the dimensions interact.
The outcome is that the combinations lead to six different pictures in the minds of people of what society and organizations look like, hence the six culture clusters (plus Japan as the seventh outlook, not fitting to any of the clusters). The 7MI are ‘the value based rules of the game, the unconscious ways of dealing with others and making decisions in a society.
The 7MI model reduces the complexity of working with the around 200 cultures in the world. It also lays the groundwork for finding solutions bridging cultural differences in different topics. In practice, using Hofstede’s dimensions(linkki sivulle) as combinations, the essence of the cultures is simpler to capture, remember and apply.
All professional groups have their own ‘rules of the game’ and the cultural Mental Images influence the professional attitudes. The Mental Images describe similar kind of organizational behavior on a micro level (organizations), meso level (legislation, institutions) and macro level (societal developments, politics) in cultural clusters.
The 7MI are the following:
Contest (emphasis on ‘winner takes all’)
Competitive cultures with a small Power Distance (PDI), high Individualism (IDV), high Masculinity (MAS), and fairly weak Uncertainty Avoidance. Examples include Australia, New Zealand, UK and US.
Network (emphasis on consensus)
Highly Individualist (IDV) and Feminine cultures with a small Power Distance (PDI), where everyone is involved in the decision-making process. Examples are Nordic countries and the Netherlands.
Well-Oiled Machine (emphasis on order)
Individualistic societies with a small Power Distance (PDI) and strong Uncertainty Avoidance have carefully balanced procedures and rules, but not much hierarchy. Examples are Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary and German-speaking Switzerland.
Solar System (emphasis on hierarchy and standardized job descriptions)
This culture cluster is like the Pyramid, but more individualistic (IDV). Examples are Belgium, France, Northern Italy, Spain and French-speaking Switzerland.
Pyramid (emphasis on loyalty, hierarchy and implicit order)
Collectivist (low IDV) cultures with a large Power Distance (PDI) and strong Uncertainty Avoidance. Examples are Brazil, Colombia, Greece, Portugal, Arabian countries, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand.
Family (emphasis on loyalty and hierarchy)
Collectivist (low IDV) cultures with a large Power Distance (PDI), where we can observe powerful in-groups and paternalistic leaders. Examples are China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore.
Japan as the Seventh Mental Image (emphasis on dynamic equilibrium)
Japan is the only country in this ‘cluster’ due to the unique combination of dimensions not found in any of the before mentioned Six Mental Images. Japan has a mid-Power Distance (PDI), a mid-Individualism (IDV), a very strong Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) and a high Masculinity (MAS) score.