Power distance, engineering teams, and leadership
There's an emotional distance between you and your team, and it can mean the difference between success and failure.
This is a post from a book I wrote about a decade ago. I’m releasing a few excerpts here, and hope you find them interesting. This is part one from the chapter on power distance and managing multinational teams.
You can think of power distance as the distance separating a boss from an employee socially. It’s the strength of social hierarchy, or the imposed psychological distance between a boss and employee.
Throughout the East and Asia, businesses rely on structure. Employees stay within their defined role and authority. In contrast, Western management increasingly relies on “low power distance” and empowers their employees. This creates an impedance mismatch between cultures, where differing expectations are directly at odds with each other.
An Eastern perspective
Most Eastern cultures lean toward hierarchy and structure. Direction comes from the top, and employees look to management to make decisions. Employees expect to work within their role in the organization. Stepping outside of one’s role or job function is rare, in part because it implies that someone else doesn’t know how to do their job.
Directly telling your boss you have a different opinion, or they are wrong, is unacceptable and would mean losing face. Instead, subtle and appropriate cues are often exchanged to communicate information between boss and employee, so that ultimately a new decision is handed down.
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Power in the West
At the other extreme, the United States has migrated away from this management style. American business tends to embrace flattened management structures and empowers employees to make decisions and “get things done.”
You might have run into this: A complaint from your American team lead about their India-based component just “blindly doing what they were told, without thinking about it first,” or “they don’t make decisions, we have to micromanage everyone.”
The American expectation is to think critically and make creative improvements on the fly, to “take initiative.”
But at the same time, the India perspective could be quite different. “We keep letting our lead know we need more information. We don’t get an answer. If we stop working, the project will be late, so we just do the best we can,” one of the team leaders in India told me, adding, “Once they see it, we’ll get better direction.”
And that hints at another problem: It’s not just the “power distance” at work here. It’s also high context communication. That culturally rich, high context messaging of the East gets lost in translation. Our Western team lead is looking for blunt, critical feedback.
The rich, high-context communication channel the Indian team normally relied on was missing. In its place was a vacuum. Combined with the perceived distance between management and the team, there’s an impenetrable divide.
Learning to work together
Western businesses assume they should put their latest management theory into practice, not realizing that very successful Western strategies don’t work in “the East” (and often South America, Africa, and even some European settings). A global team needs common understandings, and management style needs to fit the team’s culture.
East meets West
These are deeply rooted cultural norms. We have to understand it’s not a simple matter to change, or just another skill to learn. These are subconscious models that are ingrained from birth. For example, in many cases in the East, age carries far more weight than merit. Someone from Scandinavia or America will see a hopelessly tradition-bound culture making clearly illogical decisions in the face of urgent, immediate needs. But, someone from the East will see a wiser, well-informed superior making a sage decision, with long-term consequences, for the good of the community.
This dichotomy becomes more clear when we consider the thinking that drives each of these cultures, individually. In high power distance cultures, which includes most Asian cultures, direction is given from the top of the hierarchy and flows down. Leaders tend to be older, more senior, and are perceived as having the wisdom to guide an organization. There is a strong preference to deliver only good news back up the management chain. Bad news generally reflects poorly on the group. It can be perceived that the group failed in its attempt to fulfill the leader’s direction. In these cultures, Americans routinely report that, “Nobody ever tells us anything is going wrong until it’s too late.” This is partly because Americans are blind to high context communication cues, but also because the group regards leadership as making the right decisions, and it is therefore the group’s responsibility to fulfill leadership objectives no matter what.
In contrast, low power distance cultures like America have adopted empowered, flattened organizations. Leaders are often perceived as equals to subordinates, and success is a collaborative endeavor between leader and group. Success or failure lies with the individual, and recognition is individually awarded. Each person is motivated to be outstanding, to excel, and to inform leadership proactively. Bad news is only bad news if it comes late. In this cultural setting, people accustomed to high power distance environments report that, “We are often blamed for doing what we have been told to do.”
For these team members it may seem that problems are ignored until it’s too late, and team members will be irrationally blamed, even when the problem is beyond their responsibilities. There will be a lack of support structure and it will cause projects, partnerships, and joint ventures to careen out of control.
Closing the gap could mean adapting to low power distance management style. Giving vibrant, direct, and unambiguous feedback. Looking for the vacuum in the social structure, and filling it direct statements of fact. Western culture expects directness and discovery of problems, and expects team members to act quickly when such problems arise.
But there’s a problem with this approach: It assumes we can “reprogram” a lifetime of cultural experiences and social norms. It presumes the “Western way” is the only way forward. We’re talking about changing the fundamental way people behave. Cultural norms that have been learned and ingrained since birth will not change simply by being told to “act differently.”
Differences in power distance profiles
Power distance is not a single, immutable idea. It consists of cultural thinking in different dimensions. Geert Hofstede’s study of power distance encompasses extensive research involving employees of IBM in multinational settings and many subsequent years of research. Supporting findings include the work of Peter Smith, of the University of Sussex in the UK: In large power distance cultures, managers rely more on their superiors and on formal rules in decision making, while managers in low power distance cultures relied more on their own experience and on their subordinates.1
Hofstede’s original findings were based on results from 76 different countries and regions and focused on three questions: The first regarded how frequently employees were afraid to express disagreement with managers; the second, the actual perception an employee had of their boss’ decision making style (such as autocratic or paternalistic); and, the third, the subordinates preference for their boss’ decision making style. The results were compiled into the Power Distance Index (a portion of which is shown here).
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Hofstede’s most recent data on power distance, and other indexes, are available from his web site.
The differences can often be very evident in how people behave. The table below gives an indication of how low and high power distance individuals expect to act in the workplace.
Power Distance in the Workplace
Understanding power distance in the workplace is a first step toward being able to work in a multicultural environment — but we can’t just look at someone else’s workplace. We also have to understand our own workplace, how we work, and what we expect. Only be understanding both contexts can we hope to traverse one, to the other, and back again. This is truly the hard part for the international business person: Being able to smoothly move from one culture to another, translating the cultural norms and “facts on the ground” into a context that another culture can interpret.
Incidentally, there is no evidence, based on the extensive research available today, to suggest that there is a difference in the effectiveness of either low or of high power distance culture. However, there is extensive evidence that imposing the operational criteria of one culture on the other is usually ineffective.
In part two of this post, the second half of this chapter will talk about how to overcome cultural separation in the workplace.
Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Revised and expanded 3rd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill USA, 2010. ISBN 978-0-07-166418-9.