Hofstede Insights Uses Similar Mgmt 427 Eru China

I am needing help in articulating a response to the following discussion post. I am trying to formulate how to respond to this. Any help would be appreciated.

” I like your last point about the disinclination for change in many cultures, including the military. It is interesting too, because it is a good illustration of just how fluid these cultural factors are. If you measure Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) in “the military” you will come up with a very different score than if you measure UAI in the Air Force specifically. Moreover, if you were to measure UAI in my career field, air crew, you may find a higher UAI than in other communities due to our high checklist compliance mindset.

China is an interesting one. Does it have a high or low UAI? In our reading, Earnhardt claims that China is a high UAI culture (2009). However, if you look at the company Hofstede Insights states of China, “adherence to laws and rules may be flexible to suit the actual situation and pragmatism is a fact of life. The Chinese are comfortable with ambiguity; the Chinese language is full of ambiguous meanings that can be difficult for Western people to follow” (2020). Now, admittedly that is not a direct comparison because Hofstede Insights uses similar language as the Hofstede and Geert, but hey do measure through a different model. But, the same finding showed up in another source I found. In their 2015 study of Chinese and American aviation students , Julius Keller measured their UAI to be statistically indistinguishable.

Cultures change as their demographics shift, their economies rise or fall, and their nation’s geopolitical standing shifts. Perhaps China’s falling average age, growing economy, and rising global standing is causing their UAI to fall. Within the Air Force our UAI is probably much lower than in was during the Cold War days of Strategic Air Command and its blind adherence to policy. Now, as is the common saying in the Air Force, “Flexibility is the key to Air Power.” More to the point, our new Chief of Staff recently published what could be called a manifesto called Accelerate Change or Lose. The core of the vision is to rapidly and comprehensively change our force in order to meet a the demands of a changing global landscape (Brown, 2020). I am not sure what that did to our UAI, but I would guess he wants it to go way down!