Resilience at the University of Westminster

On Tuesday night Gary was back at the University of Westminster to give his annual lecture to the students on the MSC Business Psychology programme. For this evening event he was able to give more attention to Building Resilience and drawing on Gladwell’s reference in Outliers explore for himself Hofstede's Cultural Dimension www.geert-hofstede.com on ambiguity/tolerance and resilience to change with the students who come to the programme from around the world.

Having spent the first half of the session defining resilience with the group and what makes a team or individual more or less resilient and what you can do to help build resilience I asked the group if we could 'play' a while with Hofstede's cultural dimension and put it to the test with a group of largely overseas students!

I asked the group if they felt that national and cultural differences played a part in how resilient individuals were and whether they thought some nations/cultures were better able to manage change than others and it was agreed that this could play a large part.

In revealing Hofstede's top and bottom five most/least tolerant to change nations, interestingly the Greek student absolutely agree with Hofstede’s work that Greece is one of the least tolerant nations reflecting his experience that they like order and control and that if something happened to disrupt the order and control they found this really difficult to handle.

The group also agreed that the Scandinavian countries who mostly rank high on the tolerant end do seem more resilient to change.

Our mini exploration certainly supported the research to date!