Cultural Differences in Dominance Hierarchies
Culture, in addition to gender, affects dominance hierarchies.
Some cultures have strict rules in which older individuals are to be regarded as higher within a dominance hierarchy relative to younger individuals. This is very common in Asian cultures and interacts with governing models they borrowed from the West in a manner that creates extreme friction, burning off a large amount of their potential productivity. Ironically, this friction hurts older individuals much more than younger ones.
Specifically, if older individuals are presumed to hold higher status and have whims that must be obeyed, then it is extremely awkward to have an older subordinate. Functionally, this means that if an older individual hasn’t risen to a senior enough position within a group by a certain age, they are pushed out. This is a major problem in nations like South Korea and Japan where it becomes extremely difficult to keep one’s job in a corporate system after 50 if one hasn’t risen into management (this is part of the reason there are so many Korean-owned restaurants, as leaving the corporate world to start a restaurant is a common career path for older individuals who have been marginalized by this system).
Culture also influences dominance hierarchies through power distance. The presumed power someone of a higher social rank has over someone of a lower social rank varies between cultures. As people who have run teams and companies in South Korea, Peru, the U.K., and the U.S., we cannot stress enough how much power distance matters. One cannot simply take a model of governance from a low-power-distance region like North America and apply it in a high-power-distance region like the Middle East. Many more controls and stopgaps are needed to prevent high-power-distance environments from defaulting to dominance hierarchy methods of governance.
In addition, having a management position is seen as much more of a burden in high-power-distance cultures—something we learned the hard way. If someone at a U.S.-based company is doing a great job, you typically promote them, and they’re typically happy about it. It would never cross your mind that the person might rather quit than be promoted. In high-power-distance cultures, this is extremely common. In Peru, we found that about six out of seven employees would rather quit than be promoted to upper management. One of our employees suggested to us that in Peru, more people see management in the context of all the things the manager may be blamed for if someone they manage messes up—this stands in stark contrast to the way people contextualize management in the U.S., where people tend to think more about the advancement and greater power they’ll enjoy. This difference in contextualization radically affects the culture of management in said countries and how management interacts with employees.
We eventually ended up addressing our Peruvian team’s dislike for management positions by encouraging our best performers to hire family members they could train and manage. This functionally broke our Peruvian teams into family-based siloes, which goes against literally everything they teach you at Stanford Business School. When you operate in a different culture, sometimes you need to learn to adapt to that culture rather than force your practices on them.