Impact of power distance on decision quality in project management: a cross-cultural study

International projects increasingly rely on cross-cultural collaboration under conditions of uncertainty, time pressure, and incomplete information, making decision quality a critical but difficult-to-measure determinant of project performance.Despite its importance, comparable project-level indicators of decision quality are rarely available for cross-country analysis.This study addresses this gap by examining whether cross-national differences in hierarchy acceptance are systematically associated with decisionenvironment integrity, used as a proxy for comparable decision-quality conditions in international project contexts.Drawing on a conceptual framework that links power distance to decision quality through voice, information sharing, and challenge capacity, the study adopts a parsimonious, proxy-based cross-national design.Empirically, it uses a matched-country dataset of 69 countries combining Hofstede's Power Distance Index (PDI) and the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).The analysis applies distributional testing, Pearson correlation, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, and cluster analysis.The results reveal a strong negative association between PDI and CPI (r = -0.663,p < 0.001) and a statistically significant regression relationship (CPI = 88.850-0.601 PDI; R = 0.439), indicating that higher hierarchy acceptance co-occurs with weaker integrity conditions of the decision environment.Cluster analysis further identifies two stable decision-environment profiles combining hierarchy acceptance and integrity conditions.The findings do not imply cultural determinism but highlight a systematic vulnerability pattern: in higher-hierarchy contexts, decision quality becomes more dependent on compensatory governance mechanisms that preserve voice, escalation, documentation, and independent review.The study contributes by providing a transparent, reproducible macro-level test of a theoretically specified decision-quality mechanism and by translating cultural differences into governance-relevant insights for international projects.