MANAGEMENT POLICY TOWARD TASK ENVIRONMENT AGENTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY.

The cognitive orientation of the decision makers of an organization toward their task environment agents has recently emerged as an important variable in organization research. Operating primarily in the context of non-profit health and welfare organizations, scholars such as Etzioni, Perrow, Levine and White, and Lefton and Rosengren [4; 14. pp. 650-677; 9; 8, pp. 802-810] have looked at the organization's attitude toward its various clients as a key variable. Lefton and Rosengren, for example, proposed that the degree of an organization's longitudinal (long-term) and lateral (in-depth) concern for its clients tends to influence the structuring of the organization's activities, [8, pp. 802-810]. Focusing primarily on profit-oriented organizations a number of researchers, such as Dill, Thompson, Negandhi and Prasad; Negandhi and Reimann, and Reimann, Boseman, and Simonetti [3, pp. 409-413; 18; 11, pp. 24; 12; 15, pp. 25-38] have investigated the management policy available. For example, based on their study of 30 manufacturing firms operating in India, Negandhi and Reimann found a strong relationship between management philosophy (score of concern) and the degree of decentralization of decision-making, [12] The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences that exist in management policy in American (U.S.) subsidiaries operating in Italy and in domestic Italian firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]