SURVEY RESPONSE BIAS AMONG CHINESE MANAGERS.

Some studies suggest that Asian overconfidence leads to extreme response bias for Chinese survey respondents, while others claim that Confucian modesty norms lead to a cautious or midpoint bias. We propose a means of reconciling existing theoretical divergence and analyzed a sample of Chinese and American managers to test this proposition. According to MANOVA results, specific knowledge and nomothetic rating tasks engendered more extreme and fewer midpoint responses for Chinese than American managers, while idiographic rating tasks exhibited the opposite pattern. Results suggest that response bias is a major problem in research comparing Chinese and American respondents and that both extreme and midpoint response bias affects both groups depending on the type of rating task employed.