| Understanding the cross-cultural differences in engineering decision making is fundamental to resolving decision-making conflicts and thus improving the performance of cross-cultural teams. There are two major limitations in the existing literature. From the cultural perspective, most cross-cultural decision-making studies narrowly focus on explaining the differences from a single-culture dimension, individualism-collectivism. From the context perspective, most of the descriptive decision analysis research is carried out by laboratory experiments and study participants are often full-time business or MBA students. Those experiments do not relate to any real-world decision contexts those participants have often faced. In this dissertation, I address both the cross-cultural and the decision context gaps in the literature. I develop a risk perception scale, an innovation affinity scale, and six engineering decision cases, among which four cases involve the monetary attribute and two cases are about the time attribute. My study design also includes multiple measures of societal and organizational cultures of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, institutional collectivism, and in-group collectivism from the GLOBE study. I surveyed 133 full-time American engineers and 176 Chinese engineers who have rich experience in making similar types of decisions.;I linked the GLOBE's measures of culture to the group and grid framework and applied them to investigate the cultural influences on risk perception. I found that in-group collectivism had a significantly negative effect on engineers' risk perception whereas power distance had a smaller positive effect, which explained why Chinese engineers perceived significantly lower risk than did American engineers. I applied the regression weights of GLOBE measures of power distance and in-group collectivism to predict the risk perception of 61 societies. I further divided those 61 societies into three bands, low-, medium-, and high-risk perception, and discussed managerial implications. I also discussed the relationship between risk perception, innovation affinity, and risk attitude.;I studied the cross-cultural differences of risk preferences in complicated engineering cases. I found cross-cultural differences of risk preferences in terms of the proportion of engineers who chose the risky decision and the magnitude of loss above which engineers would choose the non-risky decision in three out of four monetary cases and one out of two time cases. Unlike other studies that have claimed a simple pattern, I found that the cross-cultural differences of risk preference in engineering contexts were more complicated. I developed the subjective risk return model to predict engineers' binary preference and showed its empirical validity. Based on the model, I found that engineers were averse to perceived risk and attracted by perceived benefit regardless of the cultural orientation. |
