Geert Hofstede

The Archives of Geert Hofstede at the Library of the University of Groningen are open to the public as of February 2020.

In 2016, he received his 9th honorary doctorate in Prague, at the age of 88. He died in Velp, Gelderland.

In 2014, a movie was released about Hofstede's life and work, An Engineer's Odyssey.

Hofstede received many honorary awards, and in 2011 was made a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw). He held honorary doctorates from seven universities in Europe, Nyenrode Business University, New Bulgarian University, Athens University of Economics and Business, University of Gothenburg, University of Liège, ISM University of Management and Economics, University of Pécs in 2009, and University of Tartu in 2012. He also received honorary professorships at The University of Hong Kong 1992–2000; the Beijing University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing, China; and the Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.

In October 2010, Maastricht University School of Business and Economics launched the Geert Hofstede Fund, aiming at encouraging activities around multicultural interactions and research about the impact of cultural differences.

In 2009, Reputation Institute, which "recognizes individuals who have greatly contributed to the field of reputation through both scholarship and practice", nominated Hofstede as the Best Scholar of the year.

In a 2008 article in the Academy of Management's journal, The Academy of Management Review, Galit Ailon deconstructs Culture's Consequences by mirroring it against its own assumptions and logic. Ailon finds several inconsistencies at the level of both theory and methodology, and cautions against an uncritical reading of Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

In 2008, six European universities united to create the Master in International Communication (MIC), and named themselves the Geert Hofstede Consortium.

He received much recognition for his work in cross-cultural analysis. In 2004, the Hanze University Groningen, the Netherlands established the Geert Hofstede Lecture, a bi-annual conference in the area of intercultural communication. In 2006, Maastricht University, the Netherlands inaugurated a Geert Hofstede Chair in cultural diversity.

Since his retirement in 1993, Hofstede visited numerous universities worldwide to educate students on his theoretical approaches and to continue his research in this field. He was Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and served as an extramural fellow of the Center of Economic Research at Tilburg University in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Hofstede's model explaining national cultural differences and their consequences, when introduced in 1980, came at a time when cultural differences between societies had become increasingly relevant for both economic and political reasons. The analysis of his survey data and his claims led many management practitioners to embrace the model, especially after the publication of his 1991 book, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind.

In 1980, Hofstede co-founded and became the first Director for the IRIC, the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, located at Tilburg University since 1998. Much of Hofstede's research on the basic dimensions of nations came through the IRIC. In 2001, Hofstede published an entirely re-written second edition of Culture's Consequences. In 2010, a third edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind was published with Gert Jan Hofstede, Michael H. Bond and Michael Minkov as co-authors. In this book, there were two new dimensions that were added, and the number of countries covered was between 76 and 93. This book also introduced the topic of organizational cultures as a separate and different phenomenon.

Hofstede rejoined IBM and informed it of the enormous database that IBM had at its disposal and wanted to create a research project to continue this new way of examining the data. After a lack of opportunity to conduct his research at IBM, he found two part-time jobs, including one at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Brussels as a Professor of Management, while simultaneously teaching part-time at INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. Between 1973 and 1979, he worked on the data, and analyzed it in a variety of ways. He used existing literature in psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology to relate his findings in a larger scope of study. In 1980, he published his book Culture's Consequences, where the results of his analysis were presented.

At IBM International, Hofstede started working as a management trainer and manager of personnel research, and founded and managed the Personnel Research Department. This was his transition from the field of engineering and into psychology. In this role, he played an active role in the introduction and application of employee opinion surveys in over 70 national subsidiaries of IBM around the world. He traveled across Europe and the Middle East to interview people and conduct surveys regarding people's behavior in large organizations and how they collaborated. He collected large amounts of data, but the pressures of his daily job made him unable to conduct a significant amount of research. When he took a two-year sabbatical from IBM in 1971, he delved deeper into the data he had collected from his job and discovered that there were significant differences between cultures in other organizations but got the same ranking of answers by country. At the time, the results of the IBM's surveys, with over 100,000 questionnaires, were one of the largest cross-national databases in existence.

In 1955, Hofstede married Maaike A. van den Hoek. Together, they had four sons: Gert-Jan Hofstede, who is a population biologist and social scientist in information management; Rokus Hofstede, who works as a translator; Bart Hofstede, a Cultural Counselor for the Kingdom of the Netherlands who has served in Berlin, Paris and is now serving in Beijing, and Gideon Hofstede, who works as an international marketeer. He also had ten grandchildren. Gert-Jan has worked extensively with his father and co-authored several works in the realm of culture study.

A second important period in his life was working in industry between 1955 and 1965, when he held professional and managerial jobs in three different Dutch industrial companies. By experiencing management, he had a chance to see the organization from the bottom up working as a mechanic. This training and background as an engineer shaped his research and his approach to social situations. He claims that his description of social situations appeals to a number of people: "I still have the mind of an engineer to the extent that I try to be specific...and be clear about what I am saying". That was important in his development of quantifying cultures on different dimensions.

Upon his graduation from Delft in 1953, Hofstede joined the Dutch military, working as a technical officer in the Dutch army for two years. After leaving the military he worked in industry from 1955 to 1965, starting as a factory hand in Amsterdam. In 1965 he started his graduate study in Groningen and joined IBM International, working as a management trainer and manager of personnel research. He founded and managed the Personnel Research Department. During a two-year sabbatical from IBM from 1971 to 1973 he was a visiting lecturer at IMEDE (now the International Institute for Management Development). In 1980, Hofstede co-founded and became the first Director for the IRIC, the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, located at Tilburg University since 1998.

Born to Gerrit and Evertine Geessine (Veenhoven) Hofstede, Geert Hofstede attended schools in The Hague and Apeldoorn, and received his high school diploma (Gymnasium Beta) in 1945. In 1953, Hofstede graduated from Delft Technical University with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering. After working in the industry for ten years, Hofstede entered part-time doctoral study at Groningen University in The Netherlands, and received his PhD in social psychology cum laude in 1967. His thesis was titled "The Game of Budget Control".

When World War II ended, Geert Hofstede was seventeen and had always lived in the Netherlands under rather difficult circumstances, so he decided that it was time for him to explore the world. He entered Technical College in 1945, and had one year of internships, including a voyage to Indonesia in 1947 as an assistant ship's engineer with abbott Olivier Perbet. It was his first time out of his country and being immersed in a foreign culture, and it was an early influence in his career to study cross-cultures. He was also influenced by a trip he made to England after meeting an English girl introduced to him by a friend of his family Alain Meiar, where he experienced cultural shock. He was struck by the cultural differences that he noticed between England and the Netherlands, two very close European countries. These early experiences helped translate into a lifelong career in cross-cultural research.

Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede (2 October 1928 – 12 February 2020) was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.