The impact of the national culture on the adoption and

use of social media in organizations

Pavel Bogolyubov, MBAManagement and Business Development Fellow,

Lancaster University Management School

Dublin, June 2012

E2.0/Web 2.0 vs. culture. Why?

Englis

h

Germ

an

Frenc

h

Italia

n

Polish

Man

darin

Spanis

h

Russia

n

Portu

gues

e

Dutch

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

3500

4000

Top ten languages on Wikipedia, by thousands of articles

Contd…

Dutch Italian Polish Finnish0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

50.0

60.0

Number of Wikipedia articles per capita by language (thousand articles per million

people)

National Culture

• The central premise the concept is that people in a country would share a number of commonalities, e.g., values, attitudes, beliefs, rituals and so on;

• The field is quite mature and there have been a number of attempts to create a framework describing country-bound differences between cultures.

Online Behaviour And National Culture

There is a number of publications dedicated to culture-bound differences in online behaviour

including Web 2.0, frequently pointing out collectivism as an important factor (Li and

Kirkup, 2007; Herold, 2009; Shin, 2010; Liu and Porter, 2010) or providing a general overview (Chau, 2008; Ribiere, Haddad et al., 2010).

Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

• A study done in IBM 1960s and then expanded;

• Behavioural differences between countries in the same company and the same functions;

• A multidimensional framework describing cultural differences.

Hofstede’s dimensions

• The ‘Original Four’:– Power Distance (PDI);– Collectivism/Individualism (IDV);– Masculinity (MAS);– Uncertainty Avoidance (AUI);

• Two more were added later:– Long-term orientation (LTO);– Indulgence vs. restraint (IVR).

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

• Hofstede suggested describing national cultures via six indices (Hofstede, Hofstede et al., 2010): – Power Distance (PDI) describes the degree to which

inequality is accepted in social settings such as work, school, family and so on;

– Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), is an indicator of how tolerant towards uncertainty a culture is;

– Individualism/Collectivism (IDV) is the degree to which an individual perceives themselves as part of a group, and how strong their social ties are;

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions – contd.

– Masculinity (MAS) shows whether achievement is more valued in a culture than caring for others;

– Long-Term Orientation (LTO) shows whether cultures are oriented towards the future and thus valuing persistence and adapting to change, or – conversely - look at past and present, respecting national pride and history, tradition and social obligations;

– Indulgence vs. Restraint (IVR) describes how much fun one is allowed to have in life.

What’s So Cultural About It

  PDI IDV MAS UAI LTOWS IVR

Linkedin -0.41 0.52 -0.32 -0.24 -0.17 0.31

Wikipedia -0.33 0.29 0.11 0.20 0.05 0.18

Wikihow -0.29 0.38 0.07 -0.45 -0.28 0.33

eHow -0.26 0.41 0.11 -0.47 -0.24 0.28

Wiktionary -0.24 0.24 -0.01 0.38 0.18 -0.08

The Exploration Idea

Could the cultural dimensions be superimposed onto a technology

acceptance model to create an integrative framework to be tested on companies

using E2.0 systems?

The Unified Theory of Use and Acceptance of Technology (UTAUT)

(Source: Venkatesh, Morris et al., 2003).

UTAUT’s Adaptation• We have made some amendments to the methodology:

– Qualitative data rather than a questionnaire, in order to get a deeper understanding of the reasons for why the determinants play a role and how exactly it is happening;

– Some elements of UTAUT were deliberately left out:• Behavioural intention: in all cases the implementation has already

happened;• The voluntariness was broadly similar in all cases;• The demographic factors, i.e., gender, age and experience, would

not make much sense given the low number of respondents.– In other words, we concentrated on performance expectancy,

effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions.

Results

In total, representatives of 12 knowledge-intensive companies using social

platforms were interviewed.

Findings SummaryOrganization Industry Country Interview Findings

Company A Banking Russia Portals, many difficulties - silos and high level of dependency on the boss

Company B Banking Russia As above

Company CSoftware Development Russia Portals, failed- silos

Company D Higher Education Russia Portals, successful - heavy promotion from above and group homogenuity

Company E

Mobile content development and sales Russia Various systems, success - Google'esque free-form culture

Company FNavigation products development Russia

Project management-based system, success - procedural requirements (clear benefits) and heavy promotion

Company GSoftware Development Ukraine A wiki, success after some coercion

Company HEnvironmental Services UK

In-house interactive portal with many 2.0 features, success - "open and non-oppressive culture", high levels of engagement, heavy promotion

Company IFMCG manufacturing UK Portals, failed - taylorist organizational structures and practices

Company JHeavy maichinery manufacturing UK A wiki-style system, success - clear practical benefits

Company K Software consulting Germany Hybrid wikis, successful in general, some trends highlighted

Company L

Software consulting/Call center India A wiki, success - competitions and career opportunities

Findings Summary

• In most cases (A, B, C, G, H, J, K, L and D to a degree) the trends and issues identified by the respondents were in line with Hofstede’s framework.

• Superimposing the UTAUT determinants onto Hofstede’s dimensions creates a correlational matrix (see next slide).

Integrative Matrix

  PDI IDV MAS

  High Low High Low High LowPerformance expectancy

Strong reliance on the pressure from the management – anything that is not promoted as useful is not getting done.

A pragmatic view: if there is a problem it solves, it gets used.

Knowledge exchange based largely on reciprocity and pragmatism.

The idea of wide knowledge sharing perceived very negatively and knowledge “leakage” as harmful.

Making oneself visible to the management for the sake of career prospects.

Little importance of the personal performance and overall “hard” benefits.

Effort expectancy N/A Engaged approach towards architecture development – the higher the degree of involvement at the design stage, the easier to use it is perceived to be.

N/A N/A N/A N/A

Social influence As with PE, but also unwillingness to be seen as a “show off” by the peers.

The implementation led “from within” – by super-users and champions.

Low importance in general, although there are signs of the network effect.

Very high – in/out group sharing issue and knowledge hoarding.

Systems can be used as a means of making oneself stand out from the group.

N/A

Facilitating conditions

Didn’t come across as a culture-bound factor, although the ability to customize IT solutions to the business requirements and their ease of use was frequently cited as an important factor in the choice of a system.

Two Questions, However…

• Is it social software or ICT in general? • And what about the remaining cases

that disagree with Hofstede?

Generic ICT vs. 2.0• Every single company relies on advanced ICT:

banking systems, bug trackers or process control software;

• Even the relatively low-tech Company I is using various ERP and engineering management programs, Intranet, XP-based shared drives system and so on;

• In comparison with 2.0, their implementation and adoption went in an unproblematic way.

Non-conformant Cases• Social software adoption remains a highly contextual matter;• In cases with no other influence, the dynamic defaults to the national

averages; • In on organizational context, however, a number of other factors come

to play: – demographical homogeneity (Company D) leading to lower PDI dynamic;– organizational culture conducive to Web 2.0’s ideology or otherwise (Google-esque

in Company E or mechanistic, formal and hierarchical in Company I);– or even procedural requirements (Company F);

• The data shows that any of those can overpower the national dimensions and create an overall environment stimulating or inhibiting Web 2.0’s adoption.

Practical Implications

• If the appropriate measures are taken, it can still be deployed and used effectively in culturally unfavourable conditions;

• The degree of formality in the organizational structure as well as its openness need to be taken into account:– the mode of deployment – top-down with constant drive and support from

the management vs. engaged and participative, with more emphasis on facilitation and super-users or change catalysts.

• Furthermore, breaking down internal barriers and building trust between user groups need to be taken care of.

Limitations and Further Research

• Further expansion to build a more complete international picture;

• UTAUT is a quantitative model, and our findings could benefit from supporting statistical data.

Well, it’s not a plug, but…

e-mail: p.bogolyubov1@lancaster.ac.uk

Or find me on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+

Any Questions?