Page 226 - Cultures and Organizations

What Is Different Is Dangerous 199

society, orderliness and consistency are stressed, even at the expense of
experimentation and innovation” (disagree) and “In this society, societal
requirements and instructions are spelled out in detail so citizens know
what they are expected to do” (disagree). Basically, where we measured
strong uncertainty avoidance, GLOBE respondents say there is no order
and there are no detailed instructions in their society. 10
GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance “should be” was primarily correlated
not with our UAI but with our PDI. In Chapter 3 we noted that GLOBE’s
power distance “as is” and “should be” both correlated better with our UAI
than with our PDI. It seems the meanings of our power and uncertainty
dimensions and those of GLOBE have been at least partly reversed. 11
Examples of GLOBE questions associated with uncertainty avoid-
ance “should be” are “I believe that orderliness and consistency should be
stressed, even at the expense of experimentation and innovation” (agree)
and “I believe that societal requirements and instructions should be spelled
out in detail so citizens know what they are expected to do” (agree). These
statements are primarily found in countries that in our studies score a large
power distance. 12
GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance measures therefore present no alter-
native for our UAI. In Chapter 3 we saw that GLOBE’s power distance
measures presented no alternative for our PDI. GLOBE’s use of the terms
power distance and uncertainty avoidance just confuses the concepts.

Uncertainty Avoidance According to
Occupation, Gender, and Age

It is easy to imagine occupations that are more uncertainty avoiding versus
less so (such as bank clerk versus journalist). Nevertheless, the analysis of

the IBM data across the thirty-eight available occupations did not permit
the use of the UAI for characterizing occupations. The reason is that the
three questions used to compute the index for countries (stress, rule orien-
tation, and intent to stay) had different meanings for different occupations,
so that across occupations, the three were not correlated. Anybody who
wants to measure the amount of uncertainty avoidance in occupations will
have to use other questions.
The same holds for gender differences. Women and men in the same
countries and occupations showed exactly the same stress levels and rule
orientation. Only their intent to stay differed (men on average wanting