Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s Seven Dimensions of Culture

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s “Seven Dimensions of Culture” model offers useful insights for managing cross-cultural interactions in both professional and personal settings. It explains national cultural differences in organizations and ways to effectively manage these differences in a heterogeneous business environment.

Seven Dimensions of Culture

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998) introduced a set of cultural dimensions based on wide-ranging data collected from thousands of managers from various countries.

The respondents were presented with dilemmas and were asked to respond to questions that would give researchers valuable insights into basic cultural attitudes and values. They identified seven dimensions which were called as “Seven Dimensions of Culture” which explained differences between national cultures.

The first five dimensions which focus on how society members relate to one another are universalism vs. particularism, individualism vs. collectivism, neutral vs. emotional, achievement vs. ascription and specific vs. diffuse.

The next dimension referred to as internal vs. external which addresses how society members relate to their environment and the last dimension sequential vs. synchronic talks about different aspects of time orientation.

Also Read: Impact of Socio-Cultural Environment on Business.

Universalism versus Particularism

Universalism vs. Particularism differentiates cultures based on the importance they keep on formal and standardised rules and laws as opposed to personal relationships.

The universalistic society’s members concentrate more on formal rules, values, and standards and moreover, they believe that they take it more importantly over the desires and claims of friends.

They believe that rules and laws can be applied to anyone and must be used to determine what is right and have a habit of using accurately defined agreements and the contracts for basis for conducting business, having a tendency to define global standards for company policies and human resources practices and believe that contract should not be modified.

A high importance is placed on laws and obligations because the rules come before relationships. The business agreements are fixed and there are no changes done in a different situation because there is a clear distinction between what is true and a lie.

Particularistic societies focus more on friendship and personal relationships than on formal rules and regulations.

They place emphasis on friendship and consider the situation to decide what is right or ethically acceptable. Moreover, they also believe that deals are made on friendships & relationship and the contracts are modified to be able to adjust to the new requirements in specific situations and allow variations for company and human resources policies to adapt to different environment.

Particularistic culture is typically found in developing or underdeveloped countries because people have a tendency to give a lot of importance to emotional aspects and sometimes may look for other people’s opinion in formulating decisions.

When communicating with the culture which is very relationship oriented, it is important to keep in mind that the importance of trust in business. Hence, the decisions are made on the state of the position because they feel each situation requires a different perspective.

Individualism versus Collectivism

This dimension is based on how societies give importance to individual versus group status. The degree of individualism and collectivism in a culture express how the culture sees human beings, whether as a part of a group or as an individual. In addition, it expresses the focus of a culture is either on the group goals or on the individual goals.

In the individualist culture, people derive their identity from themselves and place the individual before the group or community; people usually achieve alone and assume personal. Happiness, achievement, independence of an individual is very important in the individualist society and members are very much expected to look after themselves first.

People from this culture believe in personal freedom and achievement, make their own decisions without consulting the group and they take care of themselves, they also learn from their own mistakes.

In collectivist society, members place the group before the individual and are often characterised by the regular use of term ‘we’.

There is a very strong influence of family values, the flow of communication is always considered to go from top to bottom with high respect given to seniors. People will possibly achieve objectives in groups and assume joint responsibility in the organisation. The achievement and welfare of the group are the primary focus in the collectivist societies.

Business agreements require trust and hence the process becomes slow. Moreover, the decisions of business agreements are made at the highest level without involving the subordinates. There is social hierarchy in the community where firstly the society’s views are considered and then the individual views are considered.

Specific versus Diffuse

This dimension is known as high and low context culture. The dimension differentiates the societies based on how their participants engage co-workers in specific or several areas of their life.

Members of the specific oriented culture have a habit of keeping their personal and working lives clearly separate which keeps them ‘compartmentalised’ and helps them to have a completely different relation of authority in each group. In the specific culture, the relationship is recognised on a very impersonal level, for example, a relationship merely due to a business contract.

In a specific culture, there is no requirement for having a relationship in business, everything is followed according to the rules and regulations and is not twisted in any situation as far as possible and are said to be mostly inflexible.

In the diffuse oriented culture, people see the individual elements of their life as connected and integrated and hence there is no clear division between personal and work lives and the hierarchy of authority at work can replicate into social areas outside of work hours.

Members of diffuse culture prefer to have a more human relationship and values over just business relationship.

In a diffuse culture, it is important to build a good relationship with business partners. Business relationships require more than an element of trust which places friendship on a greater level than just a business agreement.

Achievement versus Ascription

This dimension refers to how societies distinguish on the basis of the distribution of status and respect and are similar to Hofstede’s power distance dimension.

In achievement culture, status is based on accomplishments of the members or ‘earned’.

The performance and expertise of a person are valued higher than inherited traits. The characteristic of such culture includes; respect for the seniors in the hierarchy based on previous accomplishments demonstrated aptitude of their knowledge and good performance of their jobs and companies where most of the senior managers are of varying ages and genders and have attained their positions through achievements rather than just seniority. In a literal sense, achievement is where a culture is judging a person on their accomplishments.

In ascription culture, the status is based upon social position, age, gender, wealth, titles that especially clarify status in the society and organisation. This culture can be characterised by respect for superiors in the hierarchy. For example, companies where most of the senior managers are male and are based primarily on seniority.

Neutral versus Emotion

This dimension is based on how the societies view the display of emotions by their members.

The neutral culture is characterised by not revealing one’s emotion about what one is thinking or feeling; emotions that may be hidden might accidentally explode out, cool and self-possessed behaviour, control over feelings.

The neutral culture places importance on their objectives, the emotions is not attached to the business dealings. Members of these cultures tend to bear a resemblance to machines. People control their emotions and mostly do not express them which help them to focus more on business objectives.

Emotional cultures are characterised by the verbal and nonverbal display of thoughts and feelings and easy flow of emotions and animated expressions.

In this culture, the members usually show their happiness or sadness in some situations and they usually tend to open with the other members of the society about their joys and problems and are surrounded mostly by friends or family at most of the times. It can also be seen that a variety of emotions are attached to business objectives.

Internal versus External

This dimension explains how a society distinguishes members on whether they believe that their members can control their environment or else believing that their environment controls them.

In internal culture, the society members have a mechanistic view of the environment and people in this culture believe that they control their own setting and are able to influence it.

While in the external culture, society members have a view that they can adapt themselves according to external circumstances. They believe that they are affected by environment and they cannot change it. It doesn’t come to surprise that people from internal cultures have more dominating attitudes and find very difficult to cope with change whereas people from external cultures are more flexible and comfortable with the change.

Sequential versus Synchronic

This dimension describes how time is managed in the culture. Also, the question is whether we focus on one activity at time or many.

Members of the sequential culture follow plans and schedule very strictly and prefer to do one activity at a time. They value punctuality and planning. Punctuality and obedience towards schedules are very important, deadlines are strictly followed, people focus on one activity at one time. They follow the famous statement, ‘Time is Money and don’t appreciate when someone is late’.

People from synchronous culture are very flexible with the time and do quite a few activities in parallel. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2011) said that “they can skip between the stones” and still reach the target. People in such culture usually do many things at a time. It is not considered rude to be 5 minutes late for a meeting or an appointment. Punctuality depends upon the type of relationship with that person.

Closing Thoughts

Trompenaars, 1993 & 1997

• Surveyed 15,000 managers and admin staff across 28 countries
• Theoretically devised dimensions based on interpersonal relationships and work values
• Identified 7 dimensions of culture coming under 3 general categories

National Relationship with Time (Trompenaars 1997)

Past, Present and Future Orientated.

Relationship with other People

Social identity and regard for individuals and community

• universalism vs. particularism (rules vs. relations)
• individualism vs. collectivism (regard of oneself primarily as individual or part of the group)
• neutral vs. emotional (task and objectives vs feelings such as friendliness or trustworthiness)
• specific vs. diffuse (specific relationships as prescribed by contracts or is the ‘whole’ person involved)
• achievement vs. ascription (judged by ‘accomplishments’ or status derived by family, gender, age…)

Relationship with the Environment

Degree of Control possible

However, Hofstede criticised the Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner theory by first arguing that their first five dimensions were borrowed from the work Parsons and Shills (1951) and remaining two were based on ‘relationships’ which had their roots in the work of Kluckhohn and Strodbeck (1961) (Hofstede, 1997). Hofstede concluded that Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s dimensions lacked empirical support.