The Impact of Culture on Managerial Perceptions of Quality

The rationalist school posits that as globalization gains momentum, management systems will converge, implying that culture plays a limited role. In contrast, the culturalist school suggests that managerial practices are an extension of a given country's traditions and are unique to that country. While the empirical evidence is mixed, the results of this article provide additional evidence for the importance of cultural variables in the context of a cross-national study of managerial perceptions of quality, utilizing data from the USA, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study includes the societal context in the analysis of organizations in cross-national research, and investigates whether cultural variables and company size could explain the differences in managerial perceptions of quality. Model coefficients are estimated by multinomial logistic regression analysis. The findings indicate that both organizational and cultural variables are important in explaining the differences in managerial perceptions of quality.