The increasing dominance of Asian manufacturing firms in the global economy has raised an important issue: whether these firms’ superior manufacturing performance is caused by their management control systems, the national culture of their employees, or the interaction of these two factors. This experimental study provides a direct test of the effects of national culture and management control system on manufacturing performance. The dimension of national culture studied was individualism ( vs collectivism ) because this work-related attribute has been noted as a major difference between Asian and Western cultures. In turn, the focus on cultural individualism motivated a study of two aspects of management controls: work flow interdependence and pay interdependence. The results are consistent with cultural individualism and management controls having independent, but not interactive, effects on manufacturing performance. The potential implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This study investigates the eAects of national culture on firms’ design of and employees’ preference for management controls. Data for testing two hypotheses are collected from 159 Taiwanese managers working in six each of Japanese-, Taiwanese-, and U.S.-owned, size-matched, computers/electronics firms in Taiwan. Overall, the results are consistent with national culture aAecting these firms’ design of and employees’ preference for seven management controls, though there also are anomalies. These findings are combined with prior research for identifying desirable improvements in research design and method, variable measurement and selection, and, most important, the theoretical foundation for culture-based research on management controls. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study uses Hofstede's taxonomy of work-related national cultural dimensions to analyze preferences for specific management controls at the interface between the organization and the external labor market. Four experiments were conducted with samples of last-semester Japanese and U.S. MBA students. Most of the results did not provide support for the four hypotheses. These findings are used as the basis for suggesting potential directions for future empirical refinements and theory construction.