Page 91 - Cultures and Organizations

More Equal than Others 73

Power Distance in the Workplace

Most people start their working lives as young adults, after having gone
through learning experiences in the family and at school. The role pairs
parent-child, teacher-student, and doctor-patient are now complemented
by the role pair boss-subordinate, and it should not surprise anybody when
attitudes toward parents, especially fathers, and toward teachers, which are
part of our mental programming, are transferred toward bosses.
In the large-power-distance situation, superiors and subordinates
consider each other as existentially unequal; the hierarchical system is
based on this existential inequality. Organizations centralize power as
much as possible in a few hands. Subordinates expect to be told what to
do. There is a large number of supervisory personnel, structured into tall
hierarchies of people reporting to each other. Salary systems show wide
gaps between top and bottom in the organization. Workers are relatively
uneducated, and manual work has a much lower status than offi ce work.
Superiors are entitled to privileges (literally “private laws”), and contacts
between superiors and subordinates are supposed to be initiated by the
superiors only. The ideal boss in the subordinates’ eyes, the one they
feel most comfortable with and whom they respect most, is a benevolent
autocrat or “good father.” After some experiences with “bad fathers,” they
may ideologically reject the boss’s authority complete ly, while complying
in practice.
Relationships between subordinates and superiors in a large-power-
distance organization are frequently loaded with emotions. Philippe
d’Iribarne headed up a French public research center on international
management. Through extensive interviews his research team compared
manufacturing plants of the same French multinational in France (PDI

68), the United States (PDI 40), and the Netherlands (PDI 38). In his book
on this project, d’Iribarne comments:

The often strongly emotional character of hierarchical relationships in
France is intriguing. There is an extreme diversity of feelings towards
superiors: they may be either adored or despised with equal intensity. This
situation is not at all universal: we found it neither in the Netherlands nor
in the United States. 25