ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explain how employees from the United States and Bulgaria differ in their reactions to dimensions of organizational structure. The obsequious Todor Zhivkov, the head of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1954 until the 1989 coup staged by Gorbachev-style reformers, nurtured his own and Bulgaria’s standing with the Soviets through many changes in Soviet leadership. Bulgaria’s economic structures and mechanisms were largely an importation of the Soviet system. In Bulgaria and other countries with a tradition of socialism and centralized control, collectivist ideologies have long justified the subordination of individual interests for the good of society. The American and Bulgarian employees with low levels of autonomy had similar reactions to organizational structure. The challenge of identifying fundamental structural contingencies–relationships of contextual factors to dimensions of organizational structure–would be substantially complicated by the observation of cross-national variations in context-structure relationships.
