Power distance and uncertainty avoidance differences between two Arabic countries within a same Hofstede cluster under Takaful Industry

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the differences of national culture between countries belonging to similar cluster and sharing some attributes such as language, religion or geographic location based on two of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980; Hofstede and Hofstede, 1991), power distance and uncertainty avoidance, within the context of Takaful industry (Islamic Insurance). Hofstede classified all Arabic countries within same cluster and gave them same scores for his cultural dimensions. In this study only power distance and uncertainty avoidance were chosen as the dimensions of this study for many reasons of which the ability of power distance to eliminate the information gap in all directions such as informal, horizontal, top and bottom information sharing and gathering and also to strengthen the quality of decisions it makes Khatri (2009), and uncertainty avoidance which stimulates organisations to provide customer activities Todeva (1999). This research was conducted on two Arabic countries Kuwait and Egypt.