Having been in managerial positions around the world, including US and several places in Asia, I can fully appreciate the point. In the US, and western culture in general, professionals are expected to do their job first with full authority and report later on the task accomplished. In Asia even highly qualified professionals will revert to their superiors for permission, even if those superiors are in no way qualified to judge on a particular action. It would be considered extremely impolite not to, I myself have played this game several times, both on the giving and receiving end.
Well I work in a managerial position in Asia with asians and I experience very little of that kind of behaviour. In my >30 years of experience I find it is the attitude of managers that most dictates the behaviours of subordinates. I really am sick of this nonsense, it rears its head in every thread involving an Asian airline and it smacks of cultural superiority. I've worked with Americans in American companies who spend every second trying to second guess their managers, pitifully fearful of spiteful reprisal at best and career assassination at worst.
It's ridiculously banal to construe that all people of any culture respond the same way. These stereotypes are useful to help adapt to cultural differences, can be valid inputs into incident investigation or improving CRM, but anyone who tries to apply them like a truism will quickly discover a different reality, even more so in this era of cultural homogenisation and international education.
The world is not as simple as trite populists like Malcolm Gladwell would have you believe.