Uncertainty Avoidance

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 [Page 1633]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.

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