Collectivism and Cultural Diversity

Culture has been a pervasive part of humanity since the beginning of civilization. Wood (2010), professor of communications, defines culture as "the totality of beliefs, values, understandings, practices, and ways of interpreting experience that are shared by a number of people" (p 78). The way I see it, culture shapes an individual and creates their worldview. Each culture emphasizes an important aspect of the humans and displays the complexities of our species. Even though culture includes many elements, I will discuss one of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, Individualism, and explain how it creates a high or low context culture.

Hofstede claimed there are five important dimensions seen in each culture, which include Power Distance Index, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance Index, and Long-Term Orientation. The one I find most important is Individualism, which is the degree into which individuals are integrated in the group (http://www.geert-hofstede.com/). Individualism has an impact on whether a culture is high-context, or emphasizes the cultural context of a message, or low-context, emphasizes the explicit content (Rothwell, 2010). With individualism, you can either have a collectivistic or individualistic society.

Collectivism creates more of a "we-orientation" where the group discourages individual success and encourages the success of the entire group. I believe this makes it easier to create a cohesive group since competition will be automatically stifled. However, it will be naive to assume that competition does not exist within a collectivistic group. Because of an emphasis on building relationships, collectivistic groups will be more in tune with interpersonal communication. In fact, "children from c...

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...lture are more independent, there is a need to have a low-context culture. Individualism creates more subjectivity which leads to different meanings within a situation. In order to remove ambiguity, those in this society have to explicitly verbalize all the details unlike in a collectivistic society. In the beginning of meeting new members this would be beneficial however overtime it will become repetitive and unnecessary.

There are many different cultures that impact a group yet, each culture creates a beneficial environment for their members. One should not become ethnocentric and state their culture is better than others. This will limit their mindset on the positives each culture brings to group productivity. As Gandhi proclaimed, “no culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive” to which I add “no group can thrive if attempts to limit cultural diversity.”