Different cultures, different challenges?
Greek employees feel undervalued, UK employees are concerned about timing and manners, and South Koreans struggle with hierarchy: how does culture shape the challenges employees have with leadership?
Between an entire series depolarizing diversity initiatives, and our latest article breaking conventional expectations about Gen Z’s concerts with leadership, we have dedicated a substantial part of our Uncensored pieces debunking stereotypes and challenging the way they persist in established corporate thinking.
Nevertheless, there comes a time when we may need to admit that some cultural stereotypes end up being true.
It is certainly the story painted in the data of our recent survey, which asked employees across different countries to identify and rate the challenges they face with their management. We purposefully invited participants from three different markets, namely the UK, Greece and South Korea, in an attempt to provide a comparative framework for leadership across different geographies. In other words, we wanted to gather evidence to answer a question you frequently hear in C-level meetings across geographies: “is this a challenge we only experience in our country?
The results were illuminating. Not only did the three different markets form very different employee priorities when it comes to challenges with leadership, they also confirm some of the cultural attributes most commonly characterising each country and its populations.
As it turns out, Greek employees feel severely undervalued, UK employees are preoccupied with timing and manners, and South Koreans struggle with a lack of hierarchy. Talk about validating some stereotypes, right?
Why employees from different countries identify and prioritise different challenges from their leadership is definitely a multi-faceted question, one that warrants numerous financial and anthropological studies to answer. Some cultural attributes can end up affecting employees’ expectations and values, others can reinforce certain behaviours by management. Our study merely investigated correlation and not causation, therefore it is difficult to jump to quick conclusions about the reasoning behind the different results.
But what our finding certainly proves is that no one-size-fits-all policy can adequately improve leadership across borders, and that assumptions should always be questioned. It also shows that sometimes cultural context may be more dominant than we think in shaping expectations, demands and ways of working.
So buckle up as we travel across the three different countries, taking a deeper dive at what the data of our survey revealed while also incorporating some expert opinions about how each respective culture might end up affecting the challenges employees face with their management.
💔Greece: where nobody values efforts
When it comes to the case of Greece, the data simply leaves no room for doubt. An astonishing 72,5% of respondents believe that they are not recognised often enough for their achievements, making this in fact the single most dominant challenge in terms of prevalence across all three different markets. Additionally, of the Greek employees who selected lack of recognition as a pain point they experience from their management, 58% also believe it is one of the most frequent problems they face in their daily work life.
In other words, if you randomly pick an employee out of the Greek workforce, there is an incredibly high chance they will feel that their efforts are not recognised enough by their managers.
There may be a number of reasons behind the unsatisfied need for recognition of Greek employees, some cultural and some financial. As we already explored in our article examining recognition, there is a semantic difference between HR and employees when they consider initiatives that recognise efforts. Though conventional HR wisdom sees recognition as strictly non-monetary, several employees believe it is something that should also have a monetary value.
It would certainly make sense in Greece, the only country in Europe who still has a lower nominal salary compared to 10 years ago, and an economy where compared to the rest of the EU family, employees are paid relatively little despite working long hours, as revealed by several Eurostat studies measuring productivity.
But there is a chance that the overwhelming need for more recognition might also be linked to the country’s rich cultural past, one that has made Greeks proud and admittedly occasionally entitled and in need of their laurels. Just take a look at the graph below which asked different populations in Europe whether they think their culture is superior to others.
Back to the office and the challenges with management, ranking as the second most picked pain point in Greece with only a narrow margin from recognition, comes the challenge of a lack of clear rationale in leadership’s decisions. A total of 67,5% of our Greek respondents believe that there is a lack of clarity in the reasoning behind their management’s decision making.
This fact, combined with the previous finding, suggests that there may be a compounding problem here: could Greece have a wider problem with organisations’ capacity to provide effective feedback to employees, whether in recognising achievements or rationalising different choices?
There is also another, fascinating observation that can be inferred by taking a quick glance at the scatterplot combining frequency and importance for all 30 challenges including in the survey. Turns out, Greek respondents awarded a high importance score -namely more than 3.6/4 in the importance scale- across a clear majority of challenges. In fact, a total of 6 challenges managed to score above the 3.8/4 importance scale, suggesting that employees in Greece find that many of these problems manifest in their workplaces in ways that are extremely crucial for their day to day lives.
Upon second thought, this finding might also make sense with some historical context. Ancient Greece, after all, invented the art of drama - so Greeks are allowed to be Drama queens about their demands, don’t you think?
⏲️United Kingdom: rushing to make it on time
It is one of the most definitive and universally acknowledged elements of British etiquette: being on time is very crucial, being late is quite frowned upon.
You only need to look at the fact that the standard metric for hour is the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to realise the British command of time. Punctuality is a key element of life in the UK, including in a professional capacity where presentations will always start on the clock and meetings will rarely go over time.
But how punctuality is actually achieved may be a different story for employees in the UK. When we isolate the results of our survey on the UK market, the number one challenge, with a total of 58% participants selecting it, was that “leadership operates as if everything is urgent”. This constant rush in order to finish everything on time seems to be the most frequent pain point as well, with 45.5% of participants who selected the challenge also listing it as one of the most common problems they face with their management. As it turns out, even though UK employees probably operate in the most punctual way globally, they do find that this creates a challenging and constant sense of urgency in their organisations.
“The feeling of not making a deadline or not being on time is literally something which gives us paralysing anxiety”, a British consultant told REBORRN when asked to interpret this finding. “I think we simply internalise deadlines as something urgent”.
Narrowly falling to the second place of challenges for the UK is another pain point that is closely linked with what the Brits are renowned for globally. We know that people in the UK take pride in being courteous and polite, which may explain why 58% of employees in our survey take an issue with leadership that allows only the most vocal individuals to be heard. Interestingly, both of the dominant leadership challenges for employees in the UK are culture-related challenges, while another culture pain-point - the issue of insufficient transparency across teams- barely made it out of the top five of challenges.
But as was the case with the Greek participants, the UK sample also presents some interesting findings when one looks at the scatterplot combining frequency and importance. The graph reveals a more level-headed and thoughtful approach by UK employees, one that separates the issue of frequency to the level of importance for their daily lives.
As you can see, a number of challenges relating to culture and purpose are reported as very frequent for employees in the UK, but when one looks at their importance score they realise that they are not deemed as that significant for their daily work lives. The challenge of urgency for example may be incredibly frequent but it is actually in the top 10 least important challenges for UK employees. It is probably in agreement with what the British consultant already mentioned to us about “internalising the deadline urgency”.
🪜South Korea: grappling with short-termism and ambiguous authority
Known for its miraculous economic growth and its impressive technological advancements, South Korea's work culture is often associated with intense work ethics and rigid hierarchical structures. But once again, our survey’s data reveals that some underlying issues South Korean employees have with their leadership may, in fact, be tied to these very cultural attributes.
The primary challenge identified by South Korean employees in our survey was the tendency to prioritise short-term goals over long-term planning. A notable 61% of respondents indicated that their management focuses too much on immediate results, often at the expense of strategic, long-term objectives, an issue which also emerged as the most frequent pain point for South Korean employees.
Could this short-termism by management be linked to South Korea’s historical context of rapid economic development, where quick results were often necessary to keep pace with global competition? There is no doubt that the nation's remarkable transformation from a war-torn country to a leading global economy within a few decades instilled a sense of urgency and a focus on immediate gains for South Koreans. Nevertheless, in today’s economy, this focus on short-term gains may be disliked by employees who see the value in long-term planning and sustainable growth.
Even more interestingly, ranking as the second most prominent challenge in the South Korean market was the problem of ambiguity in decision-making. A significant 59% of respondents expressed frustration with the fact that the authority for decision-making is not always evident to them. It is a challenge that exists despite the traditional hierarchical structures prevalent in South Korean workplaces. Perhaps those hierarchies provide lines of command, but can also lead to confusion when decision-making authority is not explicitly communicated or when it is inconsistently applied?
Eugena Jung, a South Korean Producer and Manager based in Seoul with over 10 years of experience in both South Korean and American companies, summarised the cultural context behind these findings quite aptly. “In order to get promoted in South Korea, you have to prove that you have done something really good and tangible for the company. Long term projects can take up to ten years or more, and the outcome may not turn around quickly, so you may have nothing to report”, she tells REBORRN, arguing that South Korean companies will rarely invest a lot of money in a project that does not show immediate returns.
“That's why most people in decision making positions only care about short term outcomes rather than long ones, to show a clear milestone and to please their own boss or the owner of the company”.
Interestingly, Eugena also blames the challenge of a lack of clear authority in decision-making on South Korea’s own strict hierarchy, “I think once again it is connected to the first question: all that matters is to make your manager or company’s owner happy, to get promoted or whatever for the sake of your personal benefit. So even if we all agree that option A is much better than option B, if the owner disagrees then you easily tend to switch. Don’t forget that in Korea, military service is required for all men, so we have this top-down approach as an embedded part of our culture. That means that sometimes, super important major decisions are not made in a very transparent or very clear way”.
Lastly, when one looks at the scatterplot combining frequency and importance of all 30 challenges, South Korean respondents also show an interesting pattern. There seems to be a more linear positioning of the challenges in the graph, where frequent issues are also important and vice versa. In other words, unlike the UK, there are basically no challenges with leadership in South Korea that are frequent but not considered significant by employees.
But sitting atop the importance scale for South-Koreans is a purpose-driven challenge, one that may be rare but is deemed incredibly meaningful for employees, namely: “it is unclear what drives us as an organisation”.
Surprisingly, South Korea was the only country out of the three that identified this as an important challenge.
Thank you for reading Uncensored this week, as we conclude our Decoding Leadership Challenges series based on the findings of our survey. In case you missed them, check out our previous articles where we explored why nobody is feeling recognised, and we examined Gen Z and its strategic concerns.
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