Uncertainty Avoidance Essay ⋆ Business Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Uncertainty is a fact of organizational life, and all organizations develop mechanisms for coping with it. However, not all organizations behave alike in their effort to avoid perceived uncertainty. According to Geert Hofstede, this is because uncertainty avoidance is a culture-dependent variable, and not all firms are embedded in similar cultures. Understanding this cultural dimension can, therefore, be helpful for making sense of particularities observed in the organizational context.

According to Hofstede, seeking recourse to the levels of uncertainty avoidance of the country in which an organization functions is a reliable guide for understanding its organizing processes and possibly predicting its reactions in the face of novel situations. Because cultures are considered to be highly country specific, the patterns of behavior that individuals tend to exhibit are significantly affected by the cultural milieu in which they find themselves, for the reason that culture is seen as the collective mental programming of individuals.

Strong uncertainty-avoiding countries tend to feel more threatened by the unknown aspects of the world, versus weak uncertainty-avoiding ones that do not experience uncertainty with analogous degrees of threat. As far as organizations are concerned, the dissimilar levels of intolerance toward ambiguity affect firms’ reactions in the precautions that they take to “combat” uncertainty. We should thus expect the procedures of Japanese firms to be quite different from those developed by Singaporean ones, because Japan is in the upper echelons of the uncertainty avoidance ranking, while Singapore is the least uncertainty avoiding country in the relevant index.

Coping By Using Technology, Rules, And Rituals

More specifically, according to Hofstede, organizations cope with uncertainty through technology, rules, and rituals. Concerning the technological dimension, high uncertainty-avoiding firms are particularly prone to adopting technological solutions and are thus more likely to seek guidance from external agencies that they see as experts. By contrast, low uncertainty avoidance firms appear more skeptical regarding solutions of this kind.

With respect to rules, strong uncertainty avoidance cultures are more fertile for the structuring of activities. This is explicable by the fact that formalization, standardization, and specialization function as absorbers of the anxiety provoked by perceived uncertainty, by making the unknown seem more controllable. Although rules constrain the possible actions that may be undertaken, this “limitation of freedom” is in an important sense anxiety reducing in absolving agents from the burden of having to choose between alternative courses of action with uncertain outcomes. On the other hand, firms in weak uncertainty avoidance cultures are expected to function less uncomfortably in relatively unstructured environments. This means that employees are more likely to take initiatives and possibly bend formal and informal rules, if they believe that acting accordingly will be beneficial for their organization.

Last, pertaining to rituals, strong uncertainty avoidance cultures are more susceptible to adherence to established patterns of behavior that do not necessarily increase the efficiency of the organization, but instead function as a “comfort blanket.” In contrast, weak uncertainty avoidance cultures are less prone to succumbing to ritualistic behaviors because they are less likely to be paralyzed by anxiety.

Uncertainty Avoidance Differences

It should be noted that high uncertainty avoidance cultures are not superiorly rational compared to low uncertainty avoidance ones, or vice versa. The uncertainty avoidance dimension is simply meant to document culturally conditioned tendencies in collective behaviors, without taking an evaluative stance. There are, of course, situations in which we may reasonably expect the levels of uncertainty avoidance to have a direct impact on the achievement of certain ends.

For instance, strong uncertainty avoidance cultures feel more threatened by deviant ideas and are thereby plausibly expected to be more resistant to change. From this perspective, the levels of uncertainty avoidance can explain the different levels of innovative activity across countries. While inventions may indeed develop more frequently in weak uncertainty avoidance cultures, strong uncertainty avoidance ones may, however, be more suitable for the commercialization of innovative ideas.

Finally, it should be highlighted that according to Hofstede, the workplace is only one of the social arenas influenced by culture. Concerning the dimension of uncertainty avoidance, he stresses that it can explain not only the persistent differences observed in the workplace, but its explanatory power also extends to the domains of legal, political, and educational organizing, not to mention a society’s philosophical and religious predispositions. For example, Hofstede argues that people in strong avoidance cultures tend to believe in truth “with a capital T,” and more often ascribe to the dogma “There is only one Truth and we have it.” Cultures of this kind tend to rely to a greater extent on religious doctrines and show a preference for grand theories. This is in stark contrast with weak uncertainty avoidance cultures, which exhibit more relativistic attitudes toward truth and theories about the nature of reality.

Bibliography:

Robert Michael Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Prentice Hall, 1963);
Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Sage, 2002);
Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival (McGraw-Hill, 2004);
Bradley L. Kirkman et al., “A Quarter Century of Culture’s Consequences: A Review of Empirical Research Incorporating Hofstede’s Cultural Values Framework,” Journal of International Business Studies (v.37/3, 2006);
Bert Scholtens and Dam Lammertjan, “Cultural Values and International Differences in Business Ethics,” Journal of Business Ethics (v.75/3, 2007);
Linghui Tang and Peter E. Koveos, “A Framework to Update Hofstede’s Cultural Value Indices: Economic Dynamics and Institutional Stability,” Journal of International Business Studies (v.39/6, 2008).

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