The factors affecting management styles in manufacturing industry in Hong Kong

There has been wide interest in the study of management styles and the effects of culture and other contextual factors in shaping them within and across nations. The Hong Kong manufacturing industry is mainly managed by local Chinese with some managers from Mainland China and Western countries. It provides a unique site for studying the differences in management style between the three groups of managers and how their management styles are shaped in the industry. The objectives of this study areas follows: Firstly to study and compare the attributes oftop management and their management styles together with the organizational context and organizational structure of the companies they manage in Hong Kong. Secondly, the effects of the aforementioned factors on their management style are investigated and a model is proposed to depict their relationships. Lastly, the future trends in the development of management style and organizational structure of firms in the industry are studied. An approach is developed to describe relationships between groupings of factors. As regards the three groups, the Hong Kong and the mainland Chinese managers appear to belong to the same cultural group compared to the Westerners here despite that the societal background in which they are raised is quite different. Also managers clearly expect management styles in manufacturing industry to develop further though little change is expected in the structure of manufacturing organizations. The cultural attributes of the managers including Hofstede's constructs are found to affect their style of managing people, managing operations and the structure of their organization. The organizational context and structure also have effects on their style of managing operations. The Aston Study's findings about relationships between organizational context and organizational structure are also validated. It can be concluded that all the three aspects studied are necessary to model influences on management styles in Hong Kong but with some aspects being more influential than others are. It is also clear that a methodology can be developed to look at relationships between groups of factors as well as simply pairs of factors.