Organizational role ambiguity as a proxy for uncertainty avoidance

Despite studies’ mixed results regarding the construct validity of Hofstede’s (2001) Uncertainty Avoidance (UA) Index and findings linking UA to related psychological, physiological, and behavioral health outcomes at the cultural level of analysis, none have examined the concurrent criterion-related validity of UA. The current study attempts to do so by introducing organizational role ambiguity (ORA), operationalized as an organization’s structured communication strategy about performance expectations between work role, division, and organization, as a correlate of UA. Data on ORA, risk-taking, and organizational satisfaction were collected from over 15,000 respondents in 20 countries and data on cultural values, wealth, sources of guidance, personality, and satisfaction were extracted from published data. Results show that ORA negatively correlates with UA and intellectual autonomy values, as well as organizational satisfaction, but positively correlates with risk-taking, masculinity values, lateral (coworkers as) sources of guidance, agreeableness, and job satisfaction. Thus, ORA, a construct organizations often assess in engagement and climate surveys, appears to be a reasonable correlate of UA. The country’s cultural context of UA is reflected in the collective experience of an organization’s communication structures within a given country. These findings have implications for organization’s accessing their own, already available, ORA data to understand its implications on employee experiences, as well as for intercultural training and global research on occupational stress.