Page 240 - Cultures and Organizations

What Is Different Is Dangerous 213

twenty-one industrialized countries. Comparing self-employment levels
with the countries’ UAI scores produced a surprise. While one would expect
that in strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures, fewer people would risk self-
employment, the opposite turned out to be the case: self-employment rates
were consistently positively correlated with UAI. A further search revealed
that, in particular, one aspect associated with strong uncertainty avoidance
accounted for the correlation: low subjective well-being in a society. Self-
employment was therefore more often chosen in countries in which people

were dissatisfied with their lives, versus countries with a higher tolerance
for the unknown. 45
If Schumpeter was right that entrepreneurs innovate more than non-
entrepreneurs, we thus found a reason for expecting more, not less, inno-
vation in high-UAI countries. Innovation, however, has more than one
face. It may be true that weak uncertainty- avoidance cultures are better
at basic innovations, but they seem to be at a disadvantage in developing
these innovations into new products or services. Implementation of new
processes demands a considerable sense of detail and punctuality. The lat-
ter are more likely to be found in strong uncertainty- avoidance countries.
Britain has produced more Nobel Prize winners than Japan, but Japan has
put more new products on the world market. There is a strong case here
for synergy between innovating cultures and implementing cultures—the
first supplying ideas, the second developing them.

Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity,
and Motivation

The motivation of employees is a classic concern of management and prob-
ably even more of management trainers and of the authors of management

books. Differences in uncertainty avoidance imply differences in motivation
patterns, but the picture becomes clearer when we simultaneously consider
the masculinity-femininity dimension described in Chapter 5. Figure 6.1
therefore presents a two-dimensional plot of country scores on uncertainty
avoidance (vertically) and masculinity (horizontally).
The usefulness of combining UAI and MAS for studying motivation
patterns was suggested by a comparison of the IBM survey results with
the work of Harvard University psychologist David McClelland (1917–98),
who in 1961 issued a now-classic book, The Achieving Society. In this book
he attempted to trace different dominant motivation patterns in different