On Measuring Culture(s) With an Inductive Mixture Approach

Traditional quantitative methods for measuring culture in international management focus on abstract, domain-general values aggregated across members of a nation. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this article introduces an alternative, an inductive mixture approach. It measures the number, content, demographic associations, and national distributions of cultural models, or shared beliefs about concrete behaviors in specific situations. To illustrate the inductive mixture approach, we present two multi-stage studies of managers and white-collar employees in China and the United States. The first study examined the cultural models for managerial leadership. The second study examined the cultural models of intra-cultural and intercultural job negotiation tactics. In each study, we illustrate national profiles of cultural models, showing their heterogeneity and context specificity. Implications for research in IM are discussed.