Ascriptive cultures like China, measure people's behaviour on the groups into which they were born or attributed by birth right, gender, caste or age but also to your interpersonal relationships and your ranking in society. They relate status to highly qualified, older more experienced persons. Senior employees of a company are highly respected because of who they are and their length of service but the trend towards shows slightly towards an achievement development. By comparison, in the USA, Germany and Finland, people are measured by how successful they are in their jobs and what an individual has done.

Ascriptive means the act of ascribing something based on particular qualities, usually beyond the person's control. In other words, in this usage, the act of determining status, rights and privileges in a society based upon things like, race, color, birth family, sex, hair color, etc. In an ascriptive society, status is determined by a particular set of personal attributes that are generally not in the individual's control as opposed to an achievement based society where satus is determined by the past and expected future achievements of the individual.