Home sweet home

I've just received an email from the SIETAR organization (Society of Intercultural Education, Training and Research) with downloads and lots of photos from the October conference in Granada (see to your right for my workshop presentation).

I downloaded and read one of the workshops I hadn't managed to attend, held by a British colleague up in Bologna who works in intercultural training. It was on "Culture and Change". Since he works with companies in Italy, there were some interesting comparative stats on Italian culture and change.

For today, I will share just a few revelations.

Along a spectrum for "uncertainty avoidance" that runs from low (1) to high (10), Italy was ranked at 7.5, while the UK at 3.5 and Sweden 2.9.
This means that Italians tend to feel more threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and try to avoid them than the Brits and the Swedes. We have seen this many times in my blog.

Along another spectrum for "power distance" Italy was ranked at 5.0, while the UK stood at 3.5 and Sweden at 3.1. This means that the less powerful members of Italian society better accept that power is distributed unequally compared to the UK and Sweden (for example). We have seen this too.

Another slide showed that Italian managers are much less willing to accept postings abroad than their counterparts in other countries: Italy, 42%, Germany 55.8%, UK 59%, USA 60.3% and Sweden 72.7%

As for the Swedes, I would guess that they are more than happy to leave their county if the proposition is made in January. As for the Italians, that daily plate of pasta is hard to give up.

a domani,
E