Guangyu Freear

Research student

You can email Guangyu Freear directly; but for media enquiries please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations team.

Current research

A Cross-cultural Study on Managerial Decision Making Process

The intention of this research is to advance understanding of how national culture affects managerial decision making processes in business management. The focus is not on the decision making outcome itself, but on certain aspects within the decision making process: managers’ choice of individual and/or group decision making.

Research shows that decisions made by individuals and groups have different characteristics and outcomes; and many factors affect which decision-making style that manager will employ; national culture has been shown to be a significant factor and perhaps one of the most important in terms of the weight it carries in decision making process.

Originating in Anglo-American management research, theories in decision making have started from single-country studies. With business and management activities becoming increasingly international, cross-cultural studies on the topic have interested researchers among Western countries.   This project is to be a cross-cultural comparative study on decision making processes across East-West cultural contexts.  It will explore to what extent national culture influences managers’ choice of individual and/or group decision making, in relation to and/or in comparison with other influential factors; consequently advancing the understanding of an important management issue: decision-making.

Supervisors

• Dr Tim Ray