We are small (20+ people), but sell out product to and do consulting work for companies of all sizes all over the world. We have never had any problem asking even our biggest customers to refine incomplete or controversial requirements, suggest improvements to their UI design, or report an anticipated delay in development.

As others have pointed out above, trust is the king in such relationship. Open, timely communication about any potential obstacles on the way to project success builds trust like nothing else (maybe with the exception of advance payment, but that’s about mutual trust. )

I am currently involved in offshoring and outsourcing software development to India. We are a small software company not having an internal hierarchy and, therefore, relying on trust between the developers, project managers and bosses.
I am an Italien citizen with Austrian roots working in Switzerland and I consider myself as a low PDI person.
I also need to say that we do not have previous experiences with outsourcing development. However, we already do have two different development sites in Switzerland which already requires us to bridge a language-gap.
Since the foundation of the company we successfully practice agile development, weekly iterations and automated testing. Our company culture gives space for creativity and relys on the sense of repesonsibility of each individual developer.

In order to proactively face any kind of challenges regarding the project in India we have always at least one person from our Swiss team in India on site working with the Indian teams.
Still we are experiencing the result that the author Dave pointed out.

I truly believe that trust and respect are fundamental factors in communication. That has also been pointed out in two comments. However, I think that unawareness regarding the PDI will result in a loss of trust with respect to work. If developers do not clearly point out potential issues you will no longer trust on their judgement, even if you consider all of them your friends, unless you are aware of the cultural difference allowing you to correctly interpret their subtle communication.

Another point that I would like to mention as a potential issue is the lack of common understanding about quality. People in different cultures are used to different levels of quality. Thus, their level of sensitivity might be very different than in Western cultures. This situation requires an initial effort to establish a common understanding about quality standards. This includes making the responsible people sensitive to symptoms revealing poor quality.

That way, if you know exactly what you want, you can ask for it and have a fair expectation that you’ll actually get it. When you don’t know what you want, you can ask the right people for that, and you’ll get something that might work.

In my personal experience, smack dab in the middle between doing what they want and doing what you want are the Romanians. They don’t seem to question what you want unless there is a good reason to do so, but they do question you when there is. I really love Romanian programmers for outsourcing small projects!

I wouldn’t personally outsource a large project.

-Kelly