The Relationship Between Gender And Ethnicity Upon Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Among Sabah Ethnicities

Abstract

Culture plays an important role in many aspects such as the way employees perform their job, productivity of organization as well as the relationship among employees in the workplace. Therefore, it is important to understand cultural dimensions among individuals to predict their behaviour that will lead to organizational success. This study was conducted to identify whether gender and ethnicity will influence people's cultural dimensions. In short, this study intends to understand the cultural dimensions among Sabah communities which involve three major ethnic groups in Sabah namely Malay-Brunei, Bajau and Kadazan- Dusun. The sample of this research was selected based on purposive convenient sampling whereby all respondents are located in Kota Kinabalu. A questionnaire was administered for data collection with a sample of two hundred and nineteen employees from both the public and the private sector. The data was analyzed using the one way ANOVA and it showed that three major ethnic groups in Sabah appear to be not significantly different on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. However the t-test found that the males differ from females on three out of four cultural dimensions namely power distance, individualism-collectivism and masculinity- femininity. The findings of this study can be considered as very interesting since a majority of Malaysians perceive that the values of the three ethnic cultures of the Malay-Brunei, Bajaus and Dusuns are different but the study proved otherwise.