The concept of Cayley-symmetric semigroups is introduced, and several equivalent conditions of a Cayley-symmetric semigroup are given so that an open problem proposed by Zhu [19] is resolved generally. Furthermore, it is proved that a strong semilattice of self-decomposable semigroups <TEX>$S_{\alpha}$</TEX> is Cayley-symmetric if and only if each <TEX>$S_{\alpha}$</TEX> is Cayley-symmetric. This enables us to present more Cayley-symmetric semi-groups, which would be non-regular. This result extends the main result of Wang [14], which stated that a regular semigroup is Cayley-symmetric if and only if it is a Clifford semigroup. In addition, we discuss Cayley-symmetry of Rees matrix semigroups over a semigroup or over a 0-semigroup.