What Culture Actually Is: Success And The Good Life Look Like. Friday’s Edition:

All People Are the Same: They Just Do Things Differently. Series 22 #5

What is success? It depends entirely on which culture you were born into. It can mean anything from owning a lot of cows, or a big house and expensive cars, or having time to spend with your family and friends and on hobbies and interests. Are others impressed when you say you work 60-hour weeks or that you never have to wake up to an alarm?

Hofstede calls this motivation towards achievement and success. The original label, masculinity versus femininity, caused decades of confusion because it sounds like a statement about gender. It isn’t. It measures something more fundamental: what does your culture tell you the good life looks like? Is the answer found in what you achieve and accumulate, or in how you live and who you spend time with? This is what it looks like in real life:

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Two colleagues at the same company receive identical promotion offers. Better title, salary increase, more responsibility, more hours at the office. The Japanese colleague accepts quickly because this gets her closer to an executive position. The promotion is recognition that her work benefits the company, that she has moved up, and that she is winning. The status matters as much as the money. Turning it down would be difficult to explain to her family.

Her Swedish colleague asks three questions before responding. Will it affect his five weeks of annual leave? Will he still leave the office at 4:30 to pick up his children? Can he work from home on Fridays? The salary increase is welcome, but life is more important than money. If the terms don’t fit his life, he won’t accept.

That difference is what Hofstede’s Motivation towards Achievement and Success dimension measures. Every culture sits somewhere between rewarding competitive achievement, material success, and ambition, and rewarding quality of life, relationships, and personal well-being.

In achievement-oriented cultures, success is visible. Expensive cars, a large house, a big paycheck, and the hours put in as proof of commitment. Ambition is a virtue, competition is healthy, and the person who works the hardest and wins the most earns the most respect. Japan scores 95 on this dimension, the highest of any country Hofstede measured. The United States scores 62. In both countries, asking about work-life balance in a job interview is not how you land the job.

In quality-of-life cultures, success is time with family, meaningful work, a community you’re part of, time to spend in activities you enjoy, and enough income to live without stress. Sweden scores 5, the lowest among all countries in the dataset. Norway scores 8. In both countries, a colleague who regularly works late may be having family problems and not want to go home, or have other issues.

In high achievement cultures, schools rank students openly, the best universities feed the best companies, and a person’s career trajectory is a direct measure of their worth. Heroes are the successful, the wealthy, and the powerful. In quality-of-life cultures, schools emphasise cooperation, and a person's worth is measured by how they treat others and what they do for the community. Heroes are those who contribute and care for others.

Neither orientation is better or worse than the other. Achievement-oriented cultures build extraordinary economies, produce relentless innovation, and generate the kind of competitive energy that drives industries forward. Quality-of-life cultures produce some of the happiest people in the world, the lowest inequality scores, and workplaces where people stay because they want to, not because they have to. Both have costs. Burnout plagues achievement cultures, and complacency can be an issue in quality-of-life cultures.

What is important to you? Money and possessions or family and time?

Saturday’s Core Brief pulls the four dimensions together in a single argument about why culture behaves the way it does.

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