A Cross-Country Comparison of the Relationships Between Strategy, Environment and Control System Attributes: Singapore and Australia.

Abstract

Following the trend towards increased cross-cultural research, this paper reports the results of a study that examines the relationships of strategy, environment, controls and performance in different national contexts viz., Singapore and Australia. A multiple discriminant model was constructed for each country to determine whether the same combination of environmental and control system variables best discriminated between the strategic types in both countries. The results yielded highly significant discriminant functions, indicating that empirical relationships among these variable exits. However, there were differences in the types of discriminating variables between the two countries. In the Singaporean model the control changeability factor loads most heavily in the discriminant function. For the Australian model, dynamism is the most significant discriminator. In terms of environment variables, all three environmental variables (dynamism, hostility and heterogeneity) are significant discriminators for Australia, while only dynamism emerges as significant in the Singapore model. These results suggest that national contexts have an influence on the discriminant functions. Areas for further research are also suggested.