India vs. Thailand: One Country Tells You to Pick Your Boss Carefully, the Other Tells You Not to Ask Too Many Questions

🇮🇳 India · 🇹🇭 Thailand

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In India, whether you get a real mentor in your first weeks on the job is, by the admission of people who've lived it, basically a dice roll on which manager you land under — one intern gets a structured buddy system, the next gets handed a problem statement and told the company doesn't have the "bandwidth" for mentorship. In Thailand, you might get a mentor, a team, and a warm welcome — and still spend your first months not quite sure what anyone actually thinks of your work, because telling you directly would risk making someone uncomfortable.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇹🇭 Thailand

India's onboarding and mentorship culture is best described as high-variance by design. At the certified "Best Workplaces," the system looks genuinely thoughtful: pre-boarding digital welcome kits go out five to ten days before a new hire's start date, every new employee gets a buddy — deliberately a peer rather than their manager — who serves as a safe outlet for questions that feel too small for formal settings, and the first 90 days run on a structured roadmap, with learning goals for days 1-30, relationship and performance milestones for days 31-60, and independent contribution goals for days 61-90, according to Great Place To Work India. Outside that certified tier, the experience can look nothing like it. One IIM Bangalore student's account of an HR internship at Kotak Mahindra Bank, published on InsideIIM, described asking directly whether interns got a mentor or buddy — and being told plainly that the organisation didn't have the bandwidth, that interns were expected to work independently with no formal induction at all. He adapted by building his own informal network, eventually presenting to a panel that included the bank's CHRO. His conclusion, echoing a separate IIM Bangalore account of far more hands-on mentorship at Aditya Birla Group: "it all depends on your manager." A Bengaluru entrepreneur's viral post comparing an Indian founder and a US founder's responses to his outreach — one reportedly hostile, the other generous with nearly an hour of his time — sparked the same debate online, with critics noting mentorship generosity varies by individual far more than by nationality.

Thailand's onboarding and mentorship culture is shaped less by company policy than by a single cultural concept: เกรงใจ (kreng jai), a reluctance to impose on or cause discomfort to others, which runs through nearly every junior-senior interaction. Seniority depends on title, age, and tenure, and juniors are generally expected to let a supervisor speak first, wait to be invited into bigger conversations, and receive feedback indirectly — strengths mentioned first, improvement areas raised gently, rarely in front of others, per workplace guides aimed at interns and new hires. A senior can explicitly release a junior from this deference by saying "ไม่ต้องเกรงใจ" (no need to be fearful) as an invitation to speak candidly — a signal many foreign hires never learn to listen for. The numbers back this up: a Robert Walters Thailand survey reported in The Nation found over half of employees rate their onboarding as merely average or poor, only 29% said it made them more likely to stay, and the country manager called manager support "one of the biggest gaps" — even though 71% said they felt supported by their direct manager, suggesting individuals are outperforming the systems around them.

The Reckoning. India's Hofstede Power Distance score of 77 and Thailand's of 64 both predict real hierarchy, but the two countries route around it differently. India's high score coexists with moderate Individualism (48), rewarding initiative and self-advocacy — finding your own mentor, building your own network — even inside a hierarchical structure. Thailand's Individualism score is far lower, at just 20, meaning the group-harmony instinct behind kreng jai isn't a side effect of hierarchy; it's closer to the organising principle of the whole culture. An assertive new hire in India who chases down their own mentor is behaving exactly as the system rewards. The same behaviour in Thailand — bypassing a supervisor, pushing for blunt feedback — risks reading as a genuine violation of the social contract, not just an unusual style.

The uncomfortable parallel underneath both systems: neither one actually guarantees you structured mentorship, whatever the glossy employer-branding deck promises. India's formal programs are real but unevenly distributed, dependent almost entirely on which manager you happen to get. Thailand's cultural warmth is real too, but it can coexist with months of genuine uncertainty about where you stand, because telling you plainly might make someone, somewhere, briefly uncomfortable — and in Thai workplace logic, that's a cost worth avoiding even at the expense of your clarity.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

InsideIIM — Subhadip Mandal, an HR intern at Kotak Mahindra Bank, recounted asking his manager directly whether he'd get a mentor, only to be told the organisation lacked the bandwidth and that interns were expected to work independently; he ended up building his own informal support network from former interns and alumni, and later rated the experience 7 out of 10, concluding that it "all depends on your manager."

InsideIIM — Deepika Mallyk, interning at Aditya Birla Group's asset management arm, described her mentor Snigdha Nandan walking her through influencer marketing from the basics and offering support when she felt directionless midway through the internship, telling her that "one needs to believe in themselves… find light in the darkest of times" — a sharply different experience from Mandal's, at a different company, underscoring how much the outcome depends on who you're assigned to.

Storyboard18, reporting on a viral X post — Bengaluru entrepreneur Shubh Agrawal described a stark contrast between a $40-million-revenue Indian founder who allegedly responded to a product question with anger and derogatory language, and a US founder behind two unicorns who spent nearly an hour patiently answering his questions; commenters pushed back on drawing a national pattern from it, noting founders in many countries vary individually in how willing they are to mentor.

Expat.com forum, "The work culture in Thailand" thread — A long-term expat poster going by beppi, describing a tech-manufacturing company north of Bangkok, said most local staff he worked with were "completely averse to making their own decisions or taking responsibility" and tended to "follow instructions blindly" rather than exercise independent judgment — a critical, individual perspective that reads very differently once set against kreng jai's emphasis on not overstepping a senior's authority unasked.

A note on sourcing: Quora was checked specifically for this pairing and returned nothing independently fetchable, consistent with prior entries in this series (its robots directives block automated retrieval outright). Genuine Reddit and Blind threads specific to India-Thailand onboarding and mentorship weren't independently locatable either. The four voices above draw on named Indian business-school journalism, a verifiable social-media-sparked debate reported by named media, and a real expat-forum post, substituted honestly for platforms that didn't yield fetchable content on this exact pairing.

Conclusion

If you're starting a new job in either country, the practical lesson is the same, even though the failure mode looks different. In India, the system can genuinely deliver a thoughtful, structured onboarding — but whether you get it depends enormously on your specific manager and company, so vet that as hard as you'd vet the role itself, and be ready to build your own support network if the formal one doesn't show up. In Thailand, warmth and inclusion will likely come easily, but clarity about how you're actually doing may not — so learn to read indirect feedback, and listen closely for the moment a senior colleague tells you it's safe to speak plainly, because that's the door opening, and it won't always open twice.

Here's what I'd tell a friend: in India, as the old advice goes, don't pick a job — pick a boss. In Thailand, don't wait to be told you're doing badly; assume gentle praise might be covering for it, and ask the quiet, private question that gets you a real answer.