Examining the Use of Hofstede ’ s Uncertainty Avoidance Construct as a Definition or Brief Comparison in Ethics Research

This research focuses on studies in the Journal of Business Ethics (hereafter JoBE) that used Hofstede’s uncertainty avoidance construct. The JoBE is the foremost outlet for ethics research for most academic disciplines. We included research from the International Journal of Value Based Management (hereafter IJoVBM) and Teaching Business Ethics (hereafter TBE), which merged with the JoBE in 2004. There were 84 studies that used Hofstede’s uncertainty avoidance construct as a definition or brief comparison. Understanding how uncertainty avoidance has already been used could provide opportunities for future research to further increase our understanding of differences in international behavior and/or perceptions.


Introduction
This research examines the use of Hofstede's cultural construct of uncertainty avoidance (hereafter UA) in international ethics research; however, while we only report on Hofstede's UA construct, the majority of the research we examined in this study included all of Hofstede's constructs.UA is a surrogate for a society's relative willingness to tolerate ambiguous outcomes.Hofstede's (1991, 150) UA construct was calculated as the combined score for a series of three questions dealing with: rules orientation, employment stability, and nervousness or stress at work.Rules orientation examines the rigidity of an individual's beliefs about following rules: "Company rules should not be broken -even if the employee thinks it is in the company's best interests" (150).The employment stability factor reflects the anticipated tenure for the individual's current job: "How long do you think you will continue working for this company?"(150).The stress-at-work factor reflects individuals' responses to the statement: "How often do you feel nervous or tense at work?" (150).Hofstede (150) defined culture as a "set of likely reactions of citizens with a common mental programming. . . .reactions need not be found within the same persons, but only statistically more often in the same society".Consequently, Hofstede's UA construct is the average of the combined scores (Formula 1) of all individuals from each country.UA =300 -30 (rule orientation) -(% intending to stay less than 5 yrs) -40 (stress score) (1) The uses of Hofstede's cultural dimension of UA vary in the JoBE as well as in the IJoVBM and TBE.In this paper those varied uses are identified by distinct categories, which allows readers to quickly search and understand what information is available in these journals.In the process of our review, we grouped articles into two categories that differentially use UA -definitional and brief comparisons.With respect to the association between these articles and ethics research, those in our definition category briefly mention UA as part of Hofstede's (1980) original research and do not link to ethics research.Brief comparison articles attempt to describe differences between countries and some of these address ethics topics.

Methodology
The first step in the data gathering process was to identify articles to examine from the JoBE, which has been published since 1982.We began by using the journal's online search function for 'UA'.To ensure that we identified all articles, we also used Google's Advanced Scholar searching for 'UA' in the JoBE.We included only original journal articles; book reviews, comments, discussions and rejoinders were not included in our analysis.While this journal has been published since 1982, the first use of Hofstede's UA construct was in 1990; so our study actually includes articles from 1990 through 2011 (e.g., a 22-year period).While we searched all volumes of the journal between 1982 and 2011, we found our first article using UA in 1990; consequently, we refer to this research as a 22-year study.
While our primary aim was to include articles from the JoBE, the publisher of this journal also published the IJoVBM from 1988 through 2003 and TBE from 1997 through 2003.These journals were 'merged into the JoBE' at the beginning of 2004.We submit that article counts in the JoBE between 1988 and 2003 (i.e., when these journals were independently published) would be understated compared to other years if these journals were not considered in the article count.Consequently, our total article count and classifications include publications from the IJoVBM and TBE.After identifying the articles that included Hofstede's UA, the second step in the data gathering process was to determine how UA was used in each article.We classified the 84 articles as either definition or brief comparisons.After classifying the articles, we subsequently reviewed the classifications for validation purposes and resolved any classification differences.Publication Year

Articles
For the 22 years of this study, we initially identified 161.Panel A of Figure 1 shows the increasing use of Hofstede's cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance in research shown in the JoBE.Even though Hofstede's book first appeared in 1980 and cited four cultural dimensions including UA, the first article found in the JoBE that referred to Hofstede's cultural dimension of UA did not appear until 1990.There are multiple reasons for the time lag between Hofstede's first article and the first article referring to his cultural dimensions in this journal.One reason is that research at that time was not as readily accessible as it is today.In addition, there is the concern that articles before 1990 were scanned into online databases which disallow users to search articles for keywords.Since 1992, however, the average use of UA in the JoBE has increased by one article every year.A univariate regression model used the number of years since Hofstede's cultural dimension of UA was first cited in the JoBE and the number of articles every year to calculate an adjusted r 2 of .56(Figure 1).
In this research, we examined the 42 articles that used UA as a definition and the 42 articles that used UA as a brief comparison.Of the 84 articles that included Hofstede's UA, 70 were in the JoBE; seven were in the IJoVBM; and, seven were in TBE.The trend-line data in Panel B of Figure 1 portray the growth in the use of Hofstede's UA in ethics research as a definition (dashed trend line) and as a comparison (dotted trend line).

Overview
For the 22 years of this study, we found 84 articles.Figure 1 shows the increasing use of Hofstede's cultural dimension of UA in research shown in the JoBE, IJoVBM and TBE.Even though Hofstede's book first appeared in 1980 and cited four cultural dimensions including UA, the first article found in the JoBE that referred to Hofstede's cultural dimension of UA did not appear until 1990.There are multiple reasons for the time lag between Hofstede's first article and the first article referring to his cultural dimensions in this journal.One reason is that research at that time was not as readily accessible as it is today.In addition, there is the concern that articles before 1990 were scanned into online databases which disallow users to search articles for keywords.Due to the varied uses of UA, the 84 articles that included UA were categorized into two groupseach with subcategories.The first group of 42 articles includes only definitional use of UA as background information.In the second group, 42 articles use UA as a brief comparison.

Definition Articles
Table 1 organizes 42 articles, spanning the years 1990 through 2011 that utilize a definition of UA.The number of times UA was cited briefly remained constant except for 2008, 2010 and 2011.The four panels in Table 1 show the subcategories of uses of UA.Four articles in Panel A define UA.The definitions of UA were used to explain corruption (Beets, 2005;Collins et al., 2009), management (Parnell & Hatem, 1997) and ethics (Rawwa et al., 1998).
Of the articles in Panel C, two articles also list Hofstede's cultural dimensions along with UA.Tang (2008) explains how UA affects people's contribution to the public well-being and Singhapakdi et al. (2001) uses UA to explain its potential effects on marketing ethics.Both articles define and list Hofstede's cultural dimensions to explain individuals' behavior within certain cultures.
Panel D includes the other uses of the UA construct.Three articles (Aygün et al., 2008;Ng & Burke, 2010; research and the authors found it necessary to mention the other cultural dimensions.Five articles (Chiu et al., 2008;Jin et al., 2007;Lin, 2010;Phau & Kea, 2007;Godos-Díez et al., 2011) did not use Hofstede's cultural dimensions in the research, but included the cultural dimensions within the limitations section of the paper.
Another four articles (Jones, 1999;Kim, 2003;Singhapakdi & Vitell, 1999;Sison, 2000) related the ability to understand countries' values to observing cultural dimensions and listed the available dimensions by which one could judge a country.UA was used differently in the final two articles.One used UA to cluster similar countries (Resick et al., 2006) and the other to reflect on previous research (Jin & Drozdenko, 2010).The listing of UA with the other Hofstede cultural dimensions allowed researchers to explain potential differences, reflect on research limitations, understand how to evaluate countries and illustrate uses of other cultural dimensions.

Brief Comparison Articles
The articles in this group provided only a brief mention of UA in a comparative study.These comparisons are separated into four subcategories in Table 2: single or multiple country studies (Panels A and B), action or belief articles (Panel C), and miscellaneous uses (Panel D).A breakdown of the number of articles in each of these three categories includes: uses of UA to compare single countries (12 articles), multiple countries (12 articles), the association of UA to another behavior (14 articles), and miscellaneous uses (four articles).
For 24 articles, UA was applied at a country level to explain actions or beliefs.The countries included in these articles vary.Panel A contains articles that focused on single country research.These included Arab societies (Sidani & Thornberry, 2010), Arab-Gulf culture (Al-Khatib et al., 2004), China (Lowe, 1996;Tan, 2008), Egypt (Sidani & Jamali, 2010), Iceland (Vaiman et al., 2011), India (Monga, 2007), Norway (Brinkmann, 2002), Turkey (Atakan et al., 2008), Thailand (Leung et al., 2009) and the United States (Jose & Thibodeaux, 1999;Simga-Mugan et al., 2005).In Panel B, the articles that reviewed two countries compared Fiji to India (Wimalasiri, 2004), France to Russia (Chhokar et al., 2001), Germany to Turkey (Schneider et al., 2011) and Hong Kong to Taiwan (Wan et al., 2009;Whitcomb et al., 1998).In addition to those countries, the United States was compared to Egypt (Marta et al., 2003), Hong Kong (Burton et al., 2000), Mexico (Marta et al., 2008), the Netherlands (Smith & Hume, 2005), Taiwan (Brody et al., 1999), Thailand (Singhapakdi et al., 2008) and United Kingdom (Leong et al., 2004).The articles in this section used UA to show cultural differences or to provide background information or reasoning for future discussions.Associating UA with particular behaviors has become an increasingly popular research area.The associations investigated in Panel C mainly focused on ethical behaviors; however, there were several other associations between UA and behavior.Of the 14 articles in Panel C, seven of them were written in the past three years.Three of these articles focused on ethics (Cherry, 2006;O'Higgins & Kelleher, 2005;Patel & Schaefer, 2009), while four other articles researched similar topics such as corruption (Sanchez et al., 2008), software piracy (Moores, 2008), moral reasoning (Fleming et al., 2010) and whistle-blowing (Zhang et al., 2009).The remaining articles examined associations between UA and topics unrelated to ethics such as: brand loyalty (Wang & Lin, 2009), conformity (Mills et al., 2009), intolerance of deviations from group norms (Vitell et al., 1993), religious factors (Sood, 1998), rules orientation (Preble & Hoffman, 1999), rule specific control systems (Haswell et al., 1999) and technology skepticism (Li et al., 2009).In addition to sorting the Panel C articles based on topics, there are also differences in the suggested associations between UA and other variables.Of the 14 articles that associate UA with a behavior, seven suggested positive relationships.In these studies UA had a positive association with ethics (Cherry, 2006;O'Higgins & Kellenher, 2005), rules specific control systems (Haswell et al., 1999), technology uncertainty (Li et al., 2009), rules orientation (Preble & Hoffman, 1999), high brand loyalty (Wang & Lin, 2009) and intolerance of deviations from group norms (Vitell et al., 1993).In four articles, a negative association was suggested between UA and software piracy (Moores, 2008), ethical decision making (Patel & Schaefer, 2009), religious factors (Sood, 1998) and whistle-blowing in China (Zhang et al., 2009).The authors of the last three articles in Panel C suggested an association involving UA; however, these articles did not indicate whether the associations were positive or negative.These articles discuss an association between UA and moral reasoning (Fleming et al., 2010), conformity (Mills et al., 2009) and corruption (Sanchez et al., 2008).
The four articles in Panel D are categorized as miscellaneous because they did not fit into any of the prior groups.One article suggests UA as a tool to compare firms (Bowen, 2007).Another discussed UA as it relates to female expatriates (Insch et al., 2008), the next article recommended using UA in future research (Khatri & Tsang, 2003) and (Resick et al., 2011) 1).Instead, there were some articles that demonstrated an association between UA and ethics that was not mentioned by Hofstede.These authors found that high UA related to decreased perception of ethical problems (Cherry, 2006;Vitell et al., 1993), a strong emphasis on enforcement of ethical codes (Preble & Hoffman, 1999), increased consideration of other formal codes of ethics when forming one's own code (Vitell et al., 1993), increased bribery (Moores, 2008), increased corruption (Sanchez et al., 2008) and decreased whistle-blowing (Zhang et al., 2009).In the later tables, the scope, detail and utilization of the association between UA and ethics are greater and more significant.

Discussion and Conclusions
Our research examined the extent and nature of the use of Hofstede's UA in articles published in the JoBE, the IJoVBM and TBE for a period of 22 years from 1990 through 2011.The beginning of this timeframe (1982) with the first issue of the JoBE is two years after Hofstede's (1980) initial publication of his four cultural dimensions.While these dimensions were introduced in 1980, our data indicate that the first article to use UA in each of these three journals was: 1992 for the JoBE, 1990 for the IJoVBM and 1998 for TBE.The data in this study along with the data in Rapp et al. (2011) can be used by future researchers as a template for how Hofstede's UA construct has been used in international research both generally in a variety of business areas and specifically in various areas of business ethics research.
Our data also indicate that 42 of the 84 (50.0%) of the articles citing Hofstede's work used the UA construct as a definition and the remaining 42 (50.0%)articles used UA as a comparison when discussing cultures.This is significantly higher than the 18 articles noted by Rapp et al. (2011) in the Journal of International Business Studies.The increased use of UA in JoBE in these two categories (4.7 times higher than Rapp et al. noted) and the fact that 52.1% of the 161 articles we initially identified were in these two categories compared to only 15.7% of Rapp et al.'s articles in these categories suggests that use of UA has not developed in international ethics research to the extent it has in other areas of international research.This point offers opportunities for new research streams in international ethics research.A limitation of our research is that it considered only articles in three ethics journals: the JoBE, the IJoVBM and TBE; of these journals, the last two have not been published since 2003.This limitation also provides the opportunity for future research which could examine the use of Hofstede's UA construct in other fields and topical areas to determine whether the results of this research are supported.
Figure 1.Number of articles using Hofstede's UA in the Journal of Business Ethics by year

Table 1 .
Articles Mentioning UA

Table 2 .
Articles Using UA in Brief Comparisons 2011 Uses UA to compare six countries briefly Italicized data indicate publications in the IJoVBM and TBE.
briefly compared six countries including the United States, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland and Taiwan.Within Table 2, there were uses of UA in ethics research; these findings (Panel C) used UA to help create hypotheses and support beliefs within ethics research.However, none of the connections with UA and ethics research in Table 2 mirrored Hofstede's suggested relationships (Table