WITKIN’S COGNITIVE STYLES AND FIELD THEORY APPLIED TO THE STUDY OF GLOBAL MANAGERS AND OD PRACTIONERS

Yiu, Lichia; Saner, Raymond : (2006-2007), “ WITKIN’S COGNITIVE STYLES AND FIELD THEORY APPLIED TO THE STUDY OF GLOBAL MANAGERS AND OD PRACTIONERS”

There has been an upsurge of publications based on Hermann Witkin’s ground breaking work on cognitive styles and human perception differentiated into field dependent and field independent styles (Winerman, 2006, Nisbett et all, 2005, Nisbett, 2003). This paper builds on current and past research of Witkin et al., and applies his concepts to the study of global managers and OD practitioners. The goal is to describe core aspects of culture related challenges which global mangers and OD practitioners have to overcome, and ends with proposing future research on possibilities of training global managers and OD practitioners in order to develop Integrated Perceptual-Cognitive Ability (IPCA). Such an IPCA competence would allow them to master both field-dependent and field-independent perceptual-cognitive skills.