It was not the usual political photo op. Five women — four of them in their 30s and all leaders of their respective political party — announced the formation of the new Finnish coalition government in Helsinki in December 2019. Led by Sanna Marin, 34 years old at the time and the world’s youngest prime minister, the cabinet of 19 ministers included 12 women. This was not surprising perhaps, given the Nordic countries’ reputation for gender equality and for mixing traditional gender roles, which Dutch intercultural researcher Geert Hofstede pointed out many years ago.
With not a grey-haired man in sight, the picture was strikingly different from the photos of the largely male, pale and stale elites still often found in politics and business in Europe. How can this persisting picture be explained? It comes down to this question: on what basis do societies tend to award status, influence, and organizational and political power? Is status ascribed, on the basis of membership of a particular group within a society? Or does status tend to be earned, on the basis of achievement and performance? And how much importance does a society attribute to performance anyway?
Ascriptive cultures will award status and influence to people because they are male and not female (or vice versa: some societies are matriarchal), older and not young, or because they belong to the “right” family, class or political party or attended the “right” school. In short, status is conferred through membership of a particular group, not on the basis of proficiency.
The Dutch organizational theorist Fons Trompenaars brought this phenomenon to the attention of international management. He points out that in an ascriptive setting, the first question likely to be asked about a job applicant’s education is “Where did you go to university?” In an achievement-oriented culture, the first question is more likely to be “What exactly did you study?”
People from ascriptive cultures may appear to those from more achievement-oriented cultures to be rather old and lacking in specialist knowledge and competence — and, for that reason, they may seem to be incomprehensibly high in the organizational hierarchy.
For more achievement-oriented cultures, performing to a high standard and demonstrating a high degree of knowledge and competence are said to be the paths to achieving status and influence. Organizations implement complex performance management systems in an attempt to reward the high achievers and to incentivize (or weed out?) the low performers.
To members of more ascriptive cultures, people from achievement-oriented cultures may seem knowledgeable, unjustifiably full of themselves, young and therefore uninfluential in their organizations. Despite their ostensible emphasis on achievement, Western societies are perhaps deceiving themselves when they look down their noses at societies in which connections and nepotism are essential for the acquisition of status. Even in the West, there is some truth in the old saw that it is often who you know and not what you know that counts.
Also, some cultures tend to regard performance differently from others. The GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) study discovered, for example, that Finland is amongst the top 20 societies when it comes to valuing performance. What counts is not who you are, but what you do. What is valued is a “can-do” attitude and a record of achievement. Maybe these are the qualities that led to that striking image in Helsinki.
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