The individualism-collectivism dimension would certainly play a role in how managers build budget slacks. In an individualistic society, not only is each individual trying to enhance his or her own power base and self-esteem, but performance evaluation by the system is also based solely on the achievements of the individual. Individuals then tend to engage in calcula tive behaviors that strongly urge them to create slack in the budget to make sure that extra resources become available and the budget is ''comfortable'' for accomplishing the goals. This ensures that the individual who accomplishes the goal is evaluated favorably and gets rewarded adequately.
In collectivistic societies, performance evaluation is based on group achievements and on meeting organizational goals rather than on individual performance. The collectivistic orientation also helps managers to cooperate with each other and compensate for the overspending in accomplishing particularly difficult projects by unqerspending on other less expensive projects. This kind of adjustment may bc; 1quite impossible to achieve in individual istic societies such as the U.S., where every individual tries to protect and advance his or her self, making group cooperative behaviors infeasible, as indicated by Kelley et al. [1987].
The uncertainty avoidance dimension also can be expected to have an impact on building budget slack, inasmuch as high uncertainty avoidance societies would be motivated to build more slack to safeguard against future uncer tainties than the low uncertainty avoidance societies. Nandan [1986] states that budget slack insulates managers against the effects of unpredicted events since they are able to draw upon the surplus resources in adverse times.