Cognitive Style and Socialisation: An exploration of learned sources of style in Finland, Poland and the UK

Many educators are faced with the problem of how to handle the different ways in which students from different cultures approach learning content and processes. In management education, study has mostly considered the socio-economic, structural and organisational aspects of national differences and the external, explicit aspects of cultural differences such as managerial attitudes and values. There has, however, been less study of the differences between national groups in managerial cognition - the way managers think. If managers from one cultural group perceive, process, interpret and structure information differently from those from another, assumptions about the design and content of educational interventions based in one culture could be challenged in another. This paper reports on an exploratory study of 200 managers in Finland, Poland and the UK to investigate, firstly, whether there are national-cultural differences in cognitive style and, secondly, whether these differences are related to individual, occupational and cultural aspects of socialisation. In the latter case, the relationship between early schooling and the way people think is explored. Respondents' cognitive styles as measured by the Allinson and Hayes (1996) Cognitive Style Index (CSI) were compared with responses to two qualitative instruments assessing attitudes to early schooling and personal confidence and against predictions about national cultural differences derived from Hofstede (1984). The results, to be followed up by more extensive study, show significant differences between national groups in cognitive approaches and some aspects of socialisation. They also suggest that the constructs being measured by the CSI reveal individual characteristics that are not fixed and innate, but instead learned through processes of personal and cultural socialisation.