the term uncertainty avoidance was used in the 1960s in a well-known American book about the theory of the firm it was applied to the level of organizations by sad and March but I borrowed it uh in the 1970s for describing differences between National societies what does uncertainty avoidance mean uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which the members of a culture of a National Society feel threatened by ambiguous and un known situations some people think that it means risk avoidance but it does not mean risk avoidance and I have a good example to show why that
is the case what does uncertainty avoidance stand for I'm opposing here uh two extremes uh the uncertainty avoiding societies and the uncertainty accepting societies and actually most societies are somewhere in between in uncertainty avoiding societies the uncertainty which is inherent in life is a threat that must be fought whereas in uncertainty accepting societies uncertainty is normal and life is accepted as it comes which also implies that in uncertainty avoiding societies there is more stress and anxiety and uncertainty accepting societies there is less stress and anxiety in certainly avoiding societies aggression and emotions may sometimes be
vented whereas in uncertainly accepting societies aggression at the emotions should be controlled uncertainty avoiding societies have a feeling that what is different is dangerous what is different is dangerous whereas un certainly accepting societies believe that what is different is curious there is in un certainly avoiding societies a need for rules there is a need for rules even if they are impractical or even if they are never practiced there must be rules there must be a rule whereas uncertainty accepting societies don't like rules very much they want fewer rules and even the rules that are necessary
May sometimes be broken in case of necessity uncertainty avoing societies believe in formalization un certain accepting societies believe in deregulation Innovations also technological innovations are adopted in uncertainty avoiding societies rather slow rather carefully for example the uh modern Information Systems Innovations have taken more time in the uncertainty avoiding societies than in the uncertainty accepting Societies in uncertainty avoiding societies 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 in uncertain accepting societies the changing of jobs is much
more easily done and finally um and very importantly uh and certainly voting societies they are afraid of people who are different who look different who behave different who come from elsewhere that's called xenophobia with an next uh whereas uncertainty accepting societies are more tolerant they as more tolerant towards people who are different how do we measure uncertainty avoidance well uh there is no absolute standards so you can only compare one country to another differences between societies is the only thing you can measure and the position on the uncertainty avoidance is measured by an index the
uncertainty avoidance index UI and the countries we have got data from have been plotted on a scale which goes from zero for um weak uncertainty avoidance societies to 100 for strong uncertainty avoiding societies now let me give you some example we have dat for 76 countries on the high side on the top we find Russia and we also find Japan in the um European countries the Western European countries France is the scores highest on uncertainty avoidance uh in uh the other side of the Atlantic we have Mexico which scores high in Europe also Italy scores
fairly high and we find high scores in the Arab countries and just above average in Germany on the low side we find also not so far from Germany but on the other side we find the Netherlands we find Australia and the United States and still lower we find India Britain is quite low China is low and the Nordic countries especially Denmark are very low what what can we do with this index the uncertainty voidance index how can we validate it what is it useful for well uh you can do statistical analysis and see what phenomena
in society are related to this index and then we discover one thing which is very interesting which is that in general uh uncertainty avoiding societies drive faster people drive faster on motor ws and even the speed limits on motorways tend to be higher there uh uncertainly accepting societies drive slower and here you show that uncertainty avoidance is not risk avoidance because obviously if you if everybody drives faster there is more risk in traffic but this is supposed to be a known risk it is not felt as a source of uncertainty in uncertainty avoiding societies there
is more alcoholism and there is less alcohol abuse in uncertainty accepting Societies in uncertainty avoiding societies it is compulsory for everybody to always be able to identify yourself so you should carry your identity card all the time now in most uncertainty accepting societies you have identity cards but carrying them is optional you only need to carry them if you want to go somewhere where where you have to identify yourself there's an interesting difference in health care between the two kinds of societies in uncertainty avoiding societies there are relatively more doctors and fewer nurses and an
uncertainty accepting societies there are relatively fewer doctors and more nurses which means that the number of tasks which on the one side are performed by the doctor himself can be delegated to nurses who are less educated who are supposed to be less expert uh there's also difference in perceived corruption uh there is an organization called Transparency International that issues a um corruption perception index you cannot measure corruption but you can measure the perception of corruption and now we are talking about wealthy countries in particular on the uncertainty avoiding side the wealthy countries tend to be
perceived as more corrupt on the uncertainty accepting side in the wealthy countries tend to be seen perceived as less corrupt there are interesting differences in the field of marketing and advertising for example in the uncertainty voiding societies clean products and pure products tend to be quite popular so cleanness and Purity are key words in marketing a product whereas in the uncertainty accepting side consumers will be more attracted by easy products by convenience product readymade products and this also is seen in advertisements in ads you will see in the in certainty avoiding societies more often an
expert but maybe somebody in a white coat who explains to you why this product is so important whereas in the advertising side on the uh uncertainty accepting societies advertising more often uses humor it is very interesting to put the two dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance next to each other 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's also countries where one is high and the other is low and so I made a
table a 2 by two table where are divided or 76 countries into high and low uh uncertainty avoidance uh strong and weak uncertainty avoidance and high and low power distance and then if I look at how people organize themselves you can see the difference and it is already there if you ask people what they imagine if they think of an organization uh now if you have a small power distance and a weak uncertainty avoidance than you are in the uh Anglo-Saxon countries you are in you United States you also are in the na 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 but nothing is fixed forever you can change the rules you can change the circumstances whereas if you have a small power distance but a strong uncertainty avoidance then you get to countries like the German speaking countries Germany Austria Switzerland but also the Baltic countries in Europe and um then you see that people imagine an organization as a kind of machine a machine that operates by itself it's not necessary that the boss intervenes all
the time to make it function but um it's the uh well oiled machine now if you move to the corner where the power distance is large and the uncertainty voidance is strong then you get to the typically ltin countries um including France but also Russia and the countries of Southeastern Europe but also some Asian countries like Japan and Korea and there people I imagine an organization like a pyramid of people that's CLE a pyramid where there is somebody at the top in France it's called a president director General p and everybody else is on their
proper place below and the organization function owing to this structure that makes it function and finally you have the combination of large power distance but weak uncertainty voidance and this we find in the two largest countries in the world uh China and India and U there an organization is rather imagined like a family um 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 own organization don't the uaii scores change over
time in a world where so many things are changing now first of all the uh scores reflect the values that have been transferred from parents to children and uh there are values that rarely change after adulthood we got them when we were children when discussing the other dimensions uh I'm also referring to research by Professor burgl from groning and University who compared answers to the same questions by two age cohorts uh successive Generations 30 years apart uh and in the case of the UI index we found no worldwide shift and also no systematic changes in
the position of countries however there is an other effect which becomes evident uh we do have data uh over a period of 80 years ever since 1935 uh from which we can reconstruct an certainty avoidance index uh and we can see that there is an oscillation in the entire world that there are periods when all indexes tend to go up and in periods when they tend to go down and the periods when uncertainty avoidance tend to be high is in periods of war and economic crisis and in periods of peace and economic stability the index
tend to go down again so this wave movement is visible worldwide but it does not affect the relative position of countries
