Page 214 - Cultures and Organizations

190 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

ways of coping with them belong to the cultural heritage of societies. They
are transferred and reinforced through basic institutions such as the family,
the school, and the state. The collectively held values of the members of a

particular society reflect them. Their roots are nonrational. They lead to
collective patterns of behavior in one society that may seem aberrant and
incomprehensible to members of other societies.

Measuring the (In)tolerance of Ambiguity in
Society: The Uncertainty Avoidance Index

Following on power distance, individualism-collectivism, and
masculinity- femininity, uncertainty avoidance (from strong to weak) is the
fourth dimension found in the IBM research project. Each country and
region in this project could be assigned an uncertainty avoidance index
(UAI) score.
Differences among countries on uncertainty avoidance were originally
discovered as a by-product of power distance. It all started with a question
about job stress: “How often do you feel nervous or tense at work?”—with
answers ranging from (1) I always feel this way to (5) I never feel this way.
Geert had been struck by the regularity of answer patterns on this question
from country to country. For example, British employees always scored less
nervous than German employees, be they managers, engineers, secretar-
ies, or unskilled factory workers. However, across all countries in the IBM
database, differences in stress were unrelated to power distance.
Close scrutiny of all questions producing stable country differences
revealed that the country mean scores on the following three items were
strongly correlated:

1. Job stress, as just described (mean score on a 1 to 5 scale).
2. Agreement with the statement “Company rules should not be broken—
even when the employee thinks it is in the company’s best interest”
(mean score on a 1 to 5 scale). This question was labeled rule orientation.
3. The percentage of employees expressing their intent to stay with the
company for a long-term career. The question was “How long do you
think you will continue working for IBM?”—and the answers ran

as follows: (1) Two years at the most; (2) From two to five years; (3)

More than five years (but I probably will leave before I retire); and (4)
Until I retire. The percentage in a country answering 3 or 4 was cor-
related with the mean answers on questions 1 and 2.