Generally, people believe that an organization's culture can change or do away with the national culture. The logic behind the belief implies that if a country began a company in another country, people from the country where the company is established would start thinking like people from the country that established it. For example, if the US establishes a company in Russia, people in Russia will be transformed by the organization’s culture to think like the US citizens. However, there is evidence that this is the opposite.
In their research, Hofstede and Andrew Laurent found that the national culture impacts the behavior of employees, and it is hard to change the employee’s behavior to follow the organizational culture. If the US established a company in France, for instance, France's employees would not leave France's national culture to that of the US easily because the national culture influences their way of life. “If a company hires premises in Paris as a whole, it would be less likely to challenge the hierarchical power then the same number premises hired in Stockholm” (Hofstede, 1997).
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Andre Laurent obtained the same results as those of Hofstede after carrying out his research. Laurent points out that employees from different countries working in the same company have more cultural differences than those from the same countries. This disputes the belief that the organizational culture changes the employees erasing the national culture.
In conclusion, there is evidence that organizational culture cannot mask the national culture. The organizational culture is sociological, while the national culture is an imprint one acquired since they started socializing. Hofstede and Laurent provide a piece of evidence in their research.
References
Hofstede, G. (1997). Culture and organizations: Software of the mind . New York: McGraw-Hill.
Laurent, A. (1989). The cross-cultural puzzle of international human resource management. Journal of human resource management 25 (1): 91-102. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930250107
