What do you think about their method of using Hofstede's national level characteristics to understand individual group members?

Some years ago I was interested on Hofstede's ideas. I think they are a good place to start to think about cultural differences or at least it was a serious effort to address those questions. For instance, his definition of culture is quite intriguing to me. I have attached four articles about Hostede's "theory" and the dicussion generated if you are interested (look at the end of the post, "attachments"): 1. An article by Hofstede himself; 2. A study which states that"national character does not reflect mean personality trait"; 3. A criticism by Brendan McSweeney to Hofstede; 4. Hofstede's reply to McSweeney.

In my case, some doubts arised which are pretty much the same ones Sabine has correctly pointed out. Let me try to summarize them:

1. Hofstede's method is Factor Analysis. As far as I know about it - very little, and specially searching in my handbook of individual differences in psychology - it seems that factor analysis is prone to circularity, the factors themselves are quite subjective and with Factor Analysis is a bit difficult to make causal inferences. On the other hand, Factor Analysis gives us a map to explore.

2. The misunderstanding of supposing that the cause of the differences between groups is the same one of the differences between individuals of a given group.

3. Comparing groups tends to ignore the heterogeneity within a group. For instance, the differences within women (or men) as a group are bigger than the mean differences between men and women.

And, in my opinion, this is exactly the "error" the author has made. While you study groups (i.e. nations) is ok. But if you compare individuals the results may lead to wrong conclusions

We are kind of in the "transition process" with this research group. How have you felt about the degree of ambiguity regarding what exactly we will be doing? Would you prefer this group to be either more flexible (defining your own role) or prefer a structure that is more pre-determined with someone telling you exactly what is happening and what your role is?

Ambiguity is fine to me because it gives enough freedom to think on your own words and not about what the "teacher" expects. Within the ambiguity realm, I see myself as an explorer. Besides, a higher or lesser degree of flexibility is also good - both of them allow to stretch your mind in different ways while they are appropiate -. In other words, in my opinion it's not the flexibility what matters (so far) but the content itself.

In your opinion, how much does culture really matter in distributed teams? In what way?

It matters quite much. According to Hofstede's culture definition (bold is mine): “as a collective phenomenon, because it is at least partly shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment where it was learned. It is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.”

In my opinion Hofstede is trying to say that humans are "information processors" and that culture shapes how that information is processed (sometimes in a very basic level, given by language. Sometimes in a very high level such as politeness, etiquette and, yes, trust).