Empowerment Within Different Cultures

From an Anglo-Saxon perspective, we can think of empowerment as individualistic – choosing and taking responsibility for our own actions. But cultural norms differ within European countries, and even more so between other nationalities and cultures around the world, which can lead to misunderstandings and disempowerment.

Based on discussions from two round table sessions, this is the fourth and final article in a series that looks at different aspects of empowerment. The first article discussed whether we can learn empowerment, the second focused on whether empowerment can lead to happiness and the third looked at entitlement and empowerment.

Historical impacts

Whilst not intentional, the participants in one of the discussions only included immigrants: Individually we had immigrated from Finland to Spain, from Hungary to Austria, from South Africa to Ireland, from France to Spain, from Israel to Columbia and from Germany to the US. Therefore within this round table on empowerment there was much discussion on culture and how it affects empowerment.

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How we think of empowerment reflects our historical, political and religious background. As an example, Erin Meyer in her excellent book The Culture Map provides three historical reasons why Southern Europe is more hierarchical than Northern Europe (Meyer does accept these are ‘dramatic oversimplifications’). Firstly the Roman empire that existed in the South of Europe was very stratified. Later, Vikings, who were very egalitarian, were a dominant force in the North of Europe. And then there is the effect of religion. Within the mainly northern European protestant religion, believers have a direct channel to God , whereas Catholics can only communicate with God through the hierarchy of the church.

Claudia Zuluaga, founder of The Future is 50/50, delves into this further, “Religion has an effect on culture and therefore empowerment. The dictatorial nature of religion presents so many limitations to people that it gets in the way of empowerment. Being able to challenge, which is contrary to religious dogma, is a big part of empowerment.”

Obviously, religion is only one in a huge number of cultural influences that affect how we operate within the workplace. In her book, Meyer looks at eight different aspects of culture.

Apart from hierarchy, in her book, Meyer ranks countries on scales covering communication (low to high context), evaluating (direct to indirect negative feedback), persuading (principal to application), trusting (task to relationship), disagreeing (confrontational to avoiding confrontations), scheduling (linear to flexible) and leadership.

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Power distance and decision making

Probably, in part, due to the reasons mentioned above, when looking at leadership, Holland is a very egalitarian society, which makes empowering individuals easy, compared to, for example, Mexico where deference to the boss is expected and therefore it is more difficult to hand decisions back to underlings.

Geert Hofstede, a Dutch academic, devised a method to measure the level of hierarchical vs egalitarian leadership – what he called ‘Power Distance’ which measures “the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.”

Therefore within a high power distance culture such as Japan, it can be perceived that there is little empowerment – but this is not necessarily the case. Japan’s culture of decision making by consensus ultimately defers to the boss, but underlings are empowered to provide input through the decision process. Imposing an egalitarian approach to empowerment to somebody in a hierarchical society can feel very unsettling and out of control.

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Decision making does not, however, necessarily mirror egalitarian or hierarchical approaches to leadership. On this scale, leaders in the US, for example, take a significantly more top down approach to decision making than for example Germans and British (although the British are closer to the Americans). This can lead to the difference between a decision with a small d rather than with a big D. American leaders expect to make decisions faster, but are more likely to then change their decision later (small d). Whereas in Germany, a consensus will have been formed around a decision (taking longer to arrive at a decision) and it is therefore less likely that the team will then change this decision at a later date (big D).

Empowerment and politics

For Erika Krizsan, Managing Director of the Insurance Factory, who moved to Austria from Hungary after the fall of communism, the first word that comes to mind when asked what is empowerment is ‘Freedom’. “I lived in Hungary under socialism, so the possibility to go to western countries after the fall of communism was real freedom. I could learn new languages such as English and German which was very empowering.”

During our discussion, we got into a political debate – whether state support encouraged or tempered empowerment.

Annemarie Osborne, a senior marketing and content strategist advocating state support: “In Germany, all of my family have a social safety net – they are protected, if they lose their job, they have programs that help them to re-educate. So, institutionally, I think a culture that has more of a social safety net, is significantly more likely to empower people. Drawing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if we aren’t secure, how can we possibly feel any level of empowerment when we’re driven by survival fear? I see that particularly in America.”

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The extreme, of course, of state support is that of a communist regime. As Erika Krizsan has discussed with her father: “Communism provided a high degree of security, everybody had a job, but what you could do was limited.”

Contrarily was the view of Colette van Jaarsveld, founder of sustainable design agency Arcology. “I look at the social welfare system in Ireland, and there is a sense of security, and therefore people just sit back and do nothing. There’s no motivation to make a difference or make a change.”

Cross-cultural companies

Little did I imagine a conversation on empowerment could get so political, so we moved away from the controversial to look at the difference between empowerment in our personal lives and whilst at work, which was commented on by Leena Taimi, Nokia Sourcing Innovation & Performance Lead. “When we talk about empowerment, I do feel that in a company, there needs to be a certain kind of safety. There needs to be security because with empowerment comes a ‘nobody’s telling me exactly what to do’ attitude and people need to be able to try things without fear of reprisals – even if they go badly wrong.”

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But can different cultural attitudes to empowerment work in one company? I agree with Leena that a culture that is independent of nationality can arise “I truly believe that if a company has a strong and positive company culture, it can overcome some issues that arise from origin related cultures.”

Dealing with different cultures definitely makes work more complicated and can lead to misunderstandings, especially when trying to empower. However, aside from the proven value of diverse teams, from experience, I can vouch that there is little as satisfying as seeing an empowered multicultural team.