From all of Professor Geert Hofstede’s dimensions I find this the most difficult one to explain in a Cultural Awareness Training. Reason being is that most people seem to associate Uncertainty Avoidance with only formal rules and nothing else.
My experience is that Western Europeans and North Americans view mediterranean countries as quite relaxed and therefore low scoring on this dimension. Whilst the opposite is true. Italy Greece and Spain all score relatively high. The same perception holds true for Westerns judging/guessing if a country scores high or low on uncertainty avoidance, if their perception of that country is somewhat chaotic. So if the perception of someone from the West is that the “other” country is chaotic and/or not very organized, they will interpret that as being a low scoring country; it’s chaotic and unorganized,hence there must be little rules. But the opposite is often true. Countries that might look disorganized usually do have a lot of rules. They might even have so many rules that the people do not know what rules to stick to, so they pick and choose the one’s that make most sense to them at that moment.