Integrating national culture into the organizational performance feedback theory

Abstract

The organizational response to performance feedback is a collective process in which groups of decision-makers face uncertainty about the future when making organizational decisions based on past performance feedback. Culture is an important variable to explain the context of collective decision processes, but it is not well understood by Organizational Performance Feedback Theory (PFT) research. The current internationalization trend of PFT research poses the question if empirical results are comparable across different cultural settings, and whether culture is a general condition of organizational performance feedback. We analyze the role of national culture as a proxy for collective interpretive processes that influence the organizational decision-making process in response to performance feedback, and we resolve some of the unexplained variances in the empirical results. We use a meta-analysis to understand if national culture poses a general condition for the organizational performance feedback process. We analyze the empirical results of 153 PFT studies covering organizations from 16 countries, and we examine the impact of four dimensions of national culture: uncertainty avoidance, performance orientation, future orientation, and institutional collectivism. We demonstrate that national culture is an important concept for PFT development.