🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In Amsterdam, the surest way to lose your team's respect is to act like their boss. In Mumbai, the surest way is to fail to. The Netherlands and India sit at opposite ends of the world's hierarchy spectrum — Hofstede scores them at 38 and 77 on power distance respectively — and the Dutch-Indian corridor, one of the busiest in global IT, has been generating cross-cultural literature and mutual bewilderment for three decades. This guide is for anyone about to travel it in either direction.
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| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Disagree with your manager openly, in the meeting, with reasons | Don't call anyone "sir" or "madam" — it causes visible discomfort |
| Come to your boss with a proposed solution, not a request for instructions | Don't wait to be told what to do; autonomy is assumed, and its absence is noted |
| Expect to be consulted on decisions that affect you — and to consult others in turn | Don't escalate over a colleague's head; it's seen as a betrayal, not initiative |
| Treat the org chart as a formality; influence runs through arguments, not titles | Don't defer to seniority as a reflex — status must be earned per-discussion |
| Give your manager critical feedback when asked (they will ask) | Don't interpret a facilitating, hands-off boss as an absent or weak one |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Show visible respect to seniors — greet them first, let them set the tone | Don't contradict your manager in front of others; raise concerns one-on-one |
| Build a personal relationship with your boss; the role is part mentor, part patron | Don't decline chai or small talk with the team — relationships are the work |
| Communicate upward proactively; bosses expect updates without asking | Don't assume silence means agreement — it may mean the "no" is being packaged |
| Learn the unwritten map of who defers to whom; it predicts everything | Don't force subordinates to give you bad news bluntly — build safe channels for it |
| Expect and give direction; a boss who gives none creates anxiety, not empowerment | Don't mistake hierarchy for lack of ambition below you — the deference is procedural |
The Dutch management model treats the boss as primus inter pares — first among equals — whose job, per Commisceo Global's Netherlands guide, is to facilitate rather than command. Businesses run flat: consensus-based decision-making (the polder model, descended from centuries of literally negotiating over shared dykes) means decisions are slower to make but faster to execute, because everyone affected was in the room. Expatica's guide for newcomers is blunt about the implications: instructions phrased as orders grate; a manager is expected to convince, and an employee is expected to push back when unconvinced. The Hofstede profile — power distance 38, individualism 100, the world's highest — describes a workplace of a hundred sovereign contractors who happen to share an office.
Deference, consequently, is not read as politeness. It is read as either a lack of opinion or a lack of courage, both career-limiting. Dutch managers routinely ask their reports to evaluate them and expect specific, unflattering answers. The system's known failure mode is the endless overleg: consensus takes meetings, and a decision requiring nine stakeholders can outlast the market conditions that prompted it — a complaint Indian professionals in the Netherlands make with some frequency, per cross-cultural studies of Dutch-Indian IT projects.
Indian corporate hierarchy is not merely organisational but relational. With a Hofstede power distance score of 77, deference to seniority is deeply normalised: decisions flow from the top, and openly questioning the boss can register as disrespect rather than diligence. But the Western reading of this as simple authoritarianism misses the reciprocal half of the deal. The Indian boss is expected to direct from the front, protect the team, develop juniors, attend their weddings, and take personal responsibility for their careers — a role closer to patron than supervisor. Research on Dutch-Indian IT collaboration notes the mirror-image complaints: the Dutch are surprised their Indian manager doesn't involve them in everyday decisions; Indians are surprised Dutch decisions take so long and that the boss, when finally asked for direction, replies with a question.
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The system's known failure mode is upward silence. Bad news travels reluctantly toward power, "yes" can mean "I heard you," and a junior engineer who has spotted the fatal flaw may package it so diplomatically that it arrives unrecognisable. Indian firms know this — the better ones build explicit channels for dissent — but a newcomer manager who relies on subordinates volunteering objections, Dutch-style, will learn about problems at delivery time.
The corridor between these two systems is where the friction lives. A Dutch manager in Bangalore who says "you decide, it's your area" believes they are conferring trust; the team may experience it as abandonment, or worse, a trap. An Indian manager in Rotterdam who assigns tasks without discussion believes they are providing clarity; the team experiences it as an insult to their professional sovereignty and says so, in the meeting, in front of everyone — which the manager experiences as mutiny.
The deeper asymmetry is what each system spends its overhead on. The Netherlands pays its coordination tax up front, in meetings, before decisions; India pays it downstream, in rework and careful upward communication, after them. Dutch decisions are slow and durable; Indian decisions are fast and revisable, because the boss who made them can unmake them by lunchtime. Neither side quite believes the other's method can possibly work, which, given the export statistics of both nations, is the funniest part.
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Quora — An Indian engineer in the Netherlands wrote that the turning point of his first year was his Dutch boss telling him, with visible exasperation, to stop being so reverent — he had been treating the man with what he considered basic professional respect, and it was being received as a performance that made everyone uncomfortable.
r/developersIndia — A returnee from Amsterdam described the reverse shock: back in Gurgaon, he questioned a VP's timeline in a sprint review "the normal Dutch way" and the room went so quiet he could hear the AC — his own manager later thanked him for the input and asked him never to deliver it that way again.
Internations Amsterdam — An Indian project lead said the hardest habit to unlearn was pre-clearing everything: she kept asking her Dutch director for approval on decisions that were hers to make, until he started replying with a single line — "What do you think?" — which she initially read as a test and eventually understood was the entire management philosophy.
HackerNews — A Dutch consultant who spent three years managing a Hyderabad team wrote that his sprint retrospectives produced nothing until he switched to one-on-one walks with no notebook; the same engineers who had "no blockers" in the meeting turned out to be carrying a detailed, accurate list of everything wrong with his architecture.
r/expats — One commenter's summary after working under both systems: "In the Netherlands your boss won't save you because that would insult you. In India your boss will save you, and you will owe them, and everyone is fine with that arrangement except your Dutch colleagues, who find it feudal."
Moving to the Netherlands means learning that hierarchy is a filing convention, not a moral order: your value is your argument, your manager wants your dissent, and no one is coming to direct you. Moving to India means learning that hierarchy is a relationship, not just a reporting line: respect is the currency, direction is a service the boss owes you, and dissent works best delivered privately, personally, and with care for everyone's standing.
What I'd tell a friend over a drink: in the Netherlands, manage your arguments; in India, manage your relationships — and in both countries, the person who masters the other one's skill ends up running the place.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.