Abstract
The purpose of this paper will be to investigate the influence that national culture has on the cooperation
in the Danish online community provider Seek4 in relation to the four factors: loyalty, respect, distribution
of responsibility and understanding of assignments.
The theory that will be representing national culture is the works of Geert Hofstede, who defined 4
dimension that are characteristic for all nationalities but with differing values. The first dimension is power
distance and refers to the degree of division of power that the members of a nationality tolerate. Denmark
is scoring low in this dimension which suggests that the Danish employees in Seek4 will not tolerate a big
division between the leader of the corporation and the employees resulting in a rather flat hierarchy,
where everybody is able to share their opinions. The Ukrainians on the other hand score high on this
dimension which means that they accept a strong leader who is responsible for all the decisions.
The second dimension is named individualism and is used to investigate whether the individual is the
centre of attention or whether it is a whole group that is the main focus. Denmark is placed as an
individualistic country, which means that the Danes believe that the individual is the most important.
Ukraine is placed among the collectivistic nations. This means that the Ukrainian employees will be more
concerned about the well-being of their group.
The third dimension is uncertainty avoidance which relates to the ability of the population in different
nations to deal with unknown events. One of the characteristics of high uncertainty avoidance is that
people like strict descriptions of assignments, and that they like assignments where only one solution is the
right. Ukraine scores high on this dimension suggesting that the Ukrainian employees in Seek4 will favor
this type of descriptions; whereas people from low uncertainty avoidance-cultures like for instance Danish
will favor assignments that are more open for the individual to define and which have several right
solutions.
Finally the dimension masculinity is made to explain the differences in values that are appreciated by the
population in different countries. The masculine cultures which include Ukraine focus on material goods
like the size of the salary. Whereas the Danish belongs to the feminine cultures and favor other values like
the relationship with co-workers and the challenges of work higher.
These four dimensions is explains 49 % of the difference between the national cultures of Denmark and
Ukraine and subsequently this difference will influence the cooperation in Seek4.
There are several areas that are important to cooperation. In relation to Seek4 we found especially four
factors that seem to be very important to the cooperation. They are: loyalty, respect, distribution of
responsibility and understanding of assignments. These four factors were derived from an initial interview
with Allan Laustsen who is responsible for the relationship between the Danish and the Ukrainian.
Loyalty refers to the interdependence between the employees and the company and among other thing
motivation is a crucial part of loyalty, as employees who are motivated tend to be far more loyal than
employees who are not motivated. In Seek4 it became obvious that different things motivated the Danish
and the Ukrainian employees. The dimension that can explain this difference is masculinity. Ukraine is a
masculine country meaning that material goods like salary are motivating for Ukrainian people; whereas
the Danish who belong to a feminine culture favor other values like the relationship with coworkers.
Respect concerns the relationship between the employees in the two departments in Seek4. In relation to
this the dimension masculinity is important as it explains what is valued by members of different cultures.
Respect for a coworker is in this paper defined as acknowledging positive abilities in the other person.
National culture does not directly affect respect; however things like lack of knowledge and subsequent
prejudice can make it impossible to build respect for other people.
Another thing that was obvious in relation to Seek4 was that the distribution of responsibility was differing
in the two separated departments. In the Danish department the hierarchy was rather flat allowing
everybody to discuss topics with each other. In the Ukrainian department on the other hand much of the
responsibility was placed with the manager Dmitriy Skudnov. It is of course the dimension power distance
that explains the difference in this area.
The final factor is dealing with the way the different employees in Seek4 understand assignments. There
are some general differences in the ways Danes and Ukrainians prefer their assignment descriptions to be
formulated. The Ukrainians like very detailed and comprehensive explanations whereas most of the Danes
prefer some freedom to shape the assignment themselves. Uncertainty is the dimension that influences
this particular difference between Danish and Ukrainian employees.
The above shows that the four dimensions formulated by Hofstede can explain a lot of the differences in
the ways the Danish and the Ukrainian employees in Seek4 work. These differences influence the
cooperation between employees.