There is an increasing trend in this globalized economy for Asian corporations to utilize Western management practices. However, studies have shown not all western management practices can be imported into Asian corporations without accounting for the values and beliefs of Asian employees. This study will explore the effects of Confucianism on the respondents¡¦ evaluation of their trainers/instructors. The specific purpose of this study is to examine the differences between Taiwanese and North Americans respondents in (1) Confucius influence, (2) conflict handling style, and tendency of (3) acquiescence response, when evaluating trainers/instructors. The relationships among these major variables were examined statistically. Results strongly suggest that Confucianism has a significant and positive impact on the tendency of acquiescence response. This response may skew the evaluation results in Taiwan, where the influence of Confucianism is significant as compared to North America. The data and analysis provided by this study is a useful reference for Asian corporations looking to import western management practices, and for international corporations looking to standardize their management systems across differing cultures.

This thesis focuses on two under-researched areas of consumer behaviour: conflict handling styles and consumer bargaining. As illustrated in this thesis, consumer bargaining is a substantial and important behaviour that has rarely been studied from a consumer perspective. Further, conflict handling, which is considered an important and wellresearched phenomenon in an organisational context, has been rarely applied to consumer behaviour, despite the potential for conflict in many areas. The aims of this thesis were to a) examine consumer bargaining behaviour across a variety of culturally diverse nations; b) develop and validate a new instrument to measure conflict handling styles; and c) examine the relationships between the likelihood of consumer bargaining, preferred conflict handling styles, and personal values. Consumer bargaining was found to be common in both developed and developing nations. Respondents from Australia and Germany reported bargaining for a broad range of products that vary in their prices, including cars, electronics, appliances, clothing, and computers. Bargaining in South Korea was even more common, including everyday purchases like clothing, and food and drink. Finally, bargaining in Brazil was almost as common as in South Korea, and also included expensive consumer durable purchases, such as electronic products and cars, in addition to everyday purchases, such as clothing, and food and drink. The conflict handling style instrument developed in this project had convergent validity with existing ratings scales, reproduced the theorised structure of the dual-concerns model of conflict handling, and had predictive validity in a service recovery context. The benefits iii of the new scale over existing ratings scales include: a) capturing relative preference for the conflict handling styles; b) reduction of sources of common method variance; c) reduction of ratings scale response biases; and d) reduction of numerical effect biases, such as different perceived distances between response categories. The newly developed scale was also used to assess the hypothesised relationships between personal values, conflict handling styles, and consumer bargaining intensity in a developed Western country (Germany). As expected, the dominate conflict handling style was positively related, while the avoid conflict handling style was negatively related to consumer bargaining intensity. Although no relationship was found between personal values and consumer bargaining intensity, personal values were found to be an antecedent of conflict handling styles. Specifically, the power value type was found to be a positive predictor of the dominate conflict handling style, while benevolence and social universalism were found to be positive predictors of the integrate conflict handling style.