Cross-Cultural Decision Making

Organizations of today are becoming increasingly multicultural. Workers, managers, as well as professionals are crossing national boundaries and, as a result, facing a variety of intercultural conflicts. While there are numerous factors involved in such conflicts, differences in the nature and style of decision making seem to be one of the major sources of confusion and frustration among the interacting members of such organizations.

Organizational theorists and psychologists as well as small-group communication scholars have argued for years about how people make decisions. Many articles and books have been written on decision making in relation to leadership, planning, and group process. Statistical decision making is also a popular area for study in the West, where decision making has generally been considered as an individual mental process involving the identification of a problem, consideration of the problem, and selection of the course of action for solving the problem. However, in Japan, for example, people do not seem to make decisions in the Western sense of the word. Decisions might be made somewhere by someone, but it is difficult to clearly identify the locus of the decision.

The realities of decision making in various parts of the world have not been thoroughly examined. In 1951, Fred N. Kerlinger asserted that the manner of reaching decisions is related to the patterns of thinking, because most people use, almost without thinking about or questioning it, the processes that have been handed down to them as part of their cultural heritage. Edward Stewart developed a theory of cross-cultural decision making by asserting that although decision making is rooted in a universal structure of cognition, once these structures are transformed and function as processes or operations, their evaluation and frequency differ from society to society. He further argues that decision making is a process or form bridging the gap between the internal mental process and action, and therefore, the values and assumptions embodied in different cultures affect the manner and rationality of decision making. Hence, more research is needed on cross-cultural decision making, comparing decision-making styles across cultures.