Hey Mike,
Great post and interesting topic. I remember reading about Dutch Shell's problem in Brazil with local site managers constantly wanting their superiors to make decisions for them. This makes sense since Brazil is a high power distance culture. What they finally did was create a ton of bureaucratic red tape to go through for them to get an answer. This forced their local managers to make decisions on their. I'm not sure where this fits into your discussion, but it does bring out the important cultural element in the whole micromanaging problem.