Cameroon's poor support of its Olympians is consistent with low Mastery values

Lack of training support back at home has been cited as a likely reason behind the disappearance of seven Cameroon-delegation athletes from the Olympic Village in London last weekend.

A CNN story published today included speculation that the missing athletes might be hoping to defect to a country where they could compete as better-supported Olympic contenders.

In the same piece, Aka Amuam Joseph, a member of Cameroon's Olympics commitee, contrasted the sub-par support that his country's athletes receive with much better support provided by South Africa and Nigeria.

This raises at least two interesting questions, the first being whether it's reasonable to compare Cameroon with Nigeria and South Africa. The second: If not, then why not, and what cultural differences may be involved?

South Africa doesn't fit
The first one is easy to answer because South Africa doesn't even fit completely into the same geo-cultural country grouping as Cameroon. Using Project GLOBE's classification, South Africa (caucasian culture) is actually Anglo, joining the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. That alone takes it out of the running for comparison with Cameroon -- but even comparison with black South Africa is problematic.

Black South Africa, which belongs within Sub-Saharan Africa along with Cameroon, Nigeria and some other countries, is actually among the least dissatisfied among all 62 GLOBE societies. Its mean scores are so different from the other Sub-S Africa countries that it sometimes functions as a outlier and wreaks havoc with mean scores for the region.

What about Nigeria?
On the surface, Nigeria appears to be reasonably similar to Cameroon because both countries have Gross Domestic Products (GDP) per capital at a little over $1,000 -- and because both rank low on the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI, 2010).

Yet cultural values tell a different story.

We turn to the Schwartz societal values, which comprise one of the most sophisticated, empirically valid frameworks available to help inform international business decisions and conflict resolution. Schwartz chose teachers as his study participants because he believes they are the carriers of a country's culture.

Of  the seven values, we need only look at two in order to propose an explanation for Cameroon's lack of investment in its Olympic athletes.

Mastery vs. Harmony
Those two values are "Mastery" and "Harmony," and they are conceptual opposites.

In high-Mastery cultures, people are encouraged to "master, direct and change their social and natural environment to meet personal or group goals." Important values are ambition, success, daring and competence. Not too surprisingly, the U.S. ranks very high in Mastery -- and you really don't even need to see the numbers to grasp that Nigeria ranks much higher than Cameroon on this variable.

Because Mastery and Harmony are conceptual opposites, we should expect Cameroon to rank higher on Harmony than Nigeria. And it does. In societies that highly value Harmony, "people are socialized to accept, appreciate and understand the world as is, to try and fit in and not change, direct or exploit." Important values are world peace and unity with nature and the environment. As the chart below illustrates, the U.S. ranks very low in Harmony.

At present, we really don't know much more about the missing athletes other than the fact that they have not been seen in the Olympic Village this week. If and when they surface publicly, we may learn whether lack of training support was the main motivator for their departure. And if another country accepts them as Olympic contenders, well, that could make for some interesting matchups in 2016.

Part 1: A lesser-but-interesting Olympic story: Vanishing athletes from Cameroon