In recent decades internationalization has forced more and more companies to expand their business operations across national boundaries. The trend has led firms to face different and unknown cultures. In international business, business success is strongly contingent, among other factors, on how business executives manage a new and unknown culture. Therefore, understanding other cultures and how those cultures influence business activities is indispensable for international operations and making appropriate business decisions. The current study is about managerial decision-making behavior and how the process is influenced by culture. Culture is one factor among many others which is active in shaping and reshaping the ongoing decision-making process and style. As the core issue of analysis, the study analyzes on a comparative basis the participation issue in the managerial decision-making process. The participation issue has been analyzed from the managerial point of view; it examines how managers ensure subordinate participation in the decision-making process. Empirical information on subordinate participation in managerial decision-making has been collected from twelve middle-sized and three large companies in three countries: Finland, India, and Bangladesh. The industrial sectors represented are the textile sector and the electronics and electrical sector. Personal interviews were conducted with forty-six middle- and higher level managers in the companies concerned. Although the interviews were based on an open-ended standardized questionnaire, certain issues were discussed with interviewees beyond the questionnaire.

In an organization, managers make different types of decisions on different occasions at different levels in order to run their organizational activities successfully. The current study has analyzed subordinate participation in three organizational decision-making areas; organizational strategy formulation, organizational change and personnel policy. The study provides a review of different organizational theories beginning from classical theory, and examines their impacts on managerial functions, including decision making activities. Later, a link is made between decision-making and culture, showing in particular how and why culture - national and organizational - has become an approach for studying organizational decision-making.

Different models of decision-making, including the rational model, have been discussed elaborately, in order to expose how organizational decisions are made in reality. Also, conclusions have been drawn about how culture influences decision-making style. As the core issue of study is subordinate participation in the decision-making process, alternative methods of participation has been discussed. Through empirical study, participation methods/styles used by managers for ensuring subordinate participation in each case country have been discussed. Moreover, a number of probable explanations have been presented for why managers adopt a particular participation method in preference to others.