10 minutes with Geert Hofstede on Uncertainty Avoidance 01032015

The term

uncertainty

avoidance

was used in the 1960s in a well-known American book on the theory of the firm. Siyad and March applied it at the level of organizations, but I borrowed it in the 1970s to describe differences between national societies. It means that certainty

avoidance

is the degree to which members of a culture of a national society feel threatened by ambiguous and unknown situations. Some people think it means risk avoidance, but it doesn't mean risk avoidance. I'll have a good example to show why. That is the case, what does it mean to avoid

uncertainty

? I am opposed here to the extremes of uncertainty-avoiding societies and uncertainty-accepting societies, and in fact most societies lie somewhere in between, where uncertainty-avoiding societies are inherent to uncertainty. life a threat that must be fought while in societies that accept uncertainty a certainty is normal and life is accepted as it comes, which also implies that in societies that avoid uncertainty there is more stress and anxiety and in societies societies that accept uncertainty there is less stress and anxiety in societies that avoid uncertainty aggression and emotions sometimes becomes an advantage while in a society that accepts certainty aggression to emotions must certainly be controlled societies that avoid have the feeling that what is different is dangerous what is different is dangerous while the uncertainty that society accepts is believing that what is different is curious there is uncertainty in avoiding societies and the need for rules there is a need for rules even if they are not practical or even If they are never practiced there must be rules there must be a rule while societies that accept uncertainty do not like rules very much they want fewer rules and even in the rules that are necessary they can sometimes be broken in case of necessity uncertainty that avoids societies they believe in the formalization and certainty that societies accept they believe in deregulation innovations also technological innovations are adopted in uncertainty they avoid fairly slow societies quite carefully for example modern information systems innovations have taken longer in societies that avoid uncertainty that in societies that accept uncertainty in societies that avoid uncertainty people tend to stay in the same job as long as they can because changing jobs is one of the most uncertain things one can do in life at certain times societies that accept changing jobs is much easier and, lastly and very importantly, certainly electoral societies are afraid that people who are different, who look different, behave differently, who come from other places, will which is called xenophobia with an ex, and while societies that accept uncertainty are more tolerant of them as well as more tolerant of people who are different, how do we measure uncertainty avoidance well?

There is no absolute standard, so one country can only be compared to another. Differences between societies are the only thing that can be measured and the position on uncertainty avoidance is measured by an index. The uncertainty avoidance index is I and the countries for which we have data have been plotted on a scale ranging from zero for weak uncertainty avoidance societies to one hundred for strongest certainty avoidance societies. Let me give you an example. We have data from 76 countries. On the high side and at the top we find Russia and we also find Japan in the European countries, Western European countries, France SC scores highest in terms of avoiding certainty, on the other side of the Atlantic we have Mexico, which has a high score in Europe, also Italy scores quite high. and we find high scores in Arab countries and just above average in Germany.

On the low side we also find not that far from Germany, but on the other side we find the Netherlands, we find Australia and the United States and even further down we fight against India, Great Britain. is quite low China is low and the Nordic countries, especially Denmark, are very low. What can we do with this index? Consult the index to avoid uncertainty. How can we validate it? What is it for? Well, you can do statistical analyzes and see what phenomena in society are related. to this index and then we discovered something that is very interesting and that is that in general uncertainty, societies that avoid driving fast or people drive faster on highways and even speed limits on highways tend to be higher, their uncertainty accepts that societies drive slower and here it is shown that avoiding uncertainty is not avoiding risks because obviously if you give your body fossil impulses there is more risk in traffic, but this is supposed to be something known, it does not feel like a source of uncertainty in societies that avoid uncertainty there is more alcoholism and there is less alcohol abuse in societies that accept uncertainty in certain societies that avoid uncertainty it is mandatory that everyone can always identify themselves, so you must carry your ID card at all times now In most societies that accept uncertainty you have identity documents, but carrying them is optional; you only need to carry them if you want to go somewhere where you have to identify yourself.

There is an interesting difference in healthcare between the two types of societies in that uncertainty-avoiding societies have relatively more doctors and fewer nurses and uncertainty-embracing societies have relatively fewer doctors. and more nurses, which means that the number of tasks that, on the one hand, are performed by the doctor himself, can be delegated to nurses with less training and who are assumed to be less experts. There is also a difference in perceived corruption. There is an organization called Transparency International. that issues an index of perception of corruption, you cannot measure corruption, you can measure the perception of corruption and now we are talking about rich countries in particular on the side that avoids uncertainty, rich countries tend to be perceived as more corrupt and their side that accepts uncertainty in the Rich countries tend to be perceived as less corrupt.

There are interesting differences in the field of marketing and advertising, for example in the uncertainty of avoiding clean products from society and pure products tend to be quite popular, so caninus and purity are keywords for obtaining a product, while in the certainty of accepting such consumers will be more attracted to easy products than to convenience products, ready-made products and this is also seen in the advertisements that you will see in the certainty of avoiding society more often a Passat expert maybe someone in a white coat who explains why this product is so important while on the advertising side about the acceptance of society's uncertainty advertising more often uses humor, it is very interesting to put the two dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance side by side now, first of all, they are not related in some parts of the world you find a combination where both are high and other parts where both are low but there are also countries where one is high and the other is low so I made a 2x2 table where I divided or 76 countries into I and low strong uncertainty avoidance and we can certainly avoid chance high and low power distance and then if I look at how the people, you can see the difference and it's already there if you ask people what they imagine if they think of an organization now, if you have a small power distance of the week to avoid uncertainty, then you are in the Anglo-Saxon countries, you are in the United States, you are also in the Nordic countries of Europe and marginally in the Netherlands, if people think of an organization, it is something like a market, a place where people interact about nothing is fixed forever, you can change the rules , you can change the circumstances, whereas if you have a small power distance but avoid uncertainty, then you get to countries like the German-speaking countries Germany Austria Switzerland but also the Baltic countries in Europe and then you see that people imagine an organization like a kind of machine, a machine that works on its own, the boss doesn't need to intervene all the time to make it work, but now it is the well-oiled machine if you move to the corner where the power distance is large and the avoidance of uncertainty is strong, then you get to the typically Latin countries, including France, but also Russia and the countries of Southeast Europe, but also some Asian countries like Japan and Korea, and there are people.

I imagine an organization as a pyramid of people, clearly a pyramid where there is someone at the top in France, his name is president, CEO, ptg and everyone else is in their right place below and the organization works because of this structure that makes works and finally you have the combination of a high power distance but a lower avoidance of certainty and we find this in the two largest countries in the world, China and India, and there an organization is rather emergent like a family, the relationship in an organization can be compared to the relationship in a family and this is also visible in the fact that there are more family owned organizations and family members are employed in the organization itself.

Don't UI scores change over time in a world where so many things are changing now? All scores reflect values ​​that have been transferred from parents to children and are average values ​​after adulthood that we obtained as children when we talked about the other dimensions. I also refer to the research of Professor Burgos Tech from the University of Groningen, who compared answers to the same questions by two age cohorts with successive generations thirty years apart and in the case of the UAL index we did not find any change in global wallet nor systematic changes in the position of countries;

However, there is another effect that is evident: we do have data for an eight-year period since 1935 from which we can reconstruct an index of uncertainty avoidance and we can see that there is an oscillation throughout the world that are periods in which that all indices tend to rise and in the periods in which they tend to rise they fall and the periods in which uncertainty is avoided and they are high are in periods of war and economic crisis and periods of peace and economic stability the indexer falls again so that this wave movement is visible throughout the world but does not affect the relative position of countries your