Explaining the Negative Correlation between Values and Practices: A Note on the Hofstede–Globe Debate

This note provides an explanation for the presumably counterintuitive, negative correlations between values and practices reported by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project. We argue that such results are compatible with basic microeconomic insights concerning diminishing marginal utility. This explanation implies that values surveys, as they are, generally elicit marginal preferences rather than underlying values. Therefore they are a problematic instrument for the measurement of cultures, and need to be improved so as to discriminate between the importance attached to an objective in general and that attached to it given current levels of satiation.