India Will Always Have a Boss. Spain Will Always Have Lunch.

🇮🇳 India · 🇪🇸 Spain

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Hofstede Insights puts India's score on the Power Distance Index at 77 out of 100; Spain sits twenty points lower, at 57. Mentioned once, because this is a relocation guide and not a seminar, the number is worth sitting with: it is the measured difference between an office where the boss's opinion is the meeting's conclusion before the meeting starts, and one where the boss's opinion is merely the loudest contribution to a long lunch that will eventually, reluctantly, produce a decision. Anyone relocating for work between these two countries is not simply changing time zones. They are changing what "yes" means, who is allowed to disagree with whom, and whether anyone will tell them directly when they have done something wrong.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇪🇸 Spain

India

India's Power Distance score of 77 is not a quirk of survey methodology; it describes an office in which, as the business-etiquette site Cyborlink notes in its summary of that research, hierarchical order is "accepted as a given" and professional titles are used consistently rather than dropped as soon as politeness allows. The mythologist-turned-management writer Devdutt Pattanaik has described the practical result as a surface-level hierarchy with little real deference underneath it: subordinates nod, agree, and then quietly route around instructions they privately think are wrong, leaving bosses who, in his words, often feel insecure with their own followers. India's MoSPI/NSO Time Use Survey 2024 adds an unglamorous footnote: among people aged 15 to 59, about 75 percent of men but only 25 percent of women reported employment-related activity on the reference day — a reminder that whatever hierarchy exists still runs, disproportionately, through men.

That hierarchy is also being renovated, loudly, with the tenants still inside it. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace data, cited in a Yahoo Finance analysis by Gallup's own Vibhas Ratanjee, found India's employee engagement fell seven points in a single reporting cycle — roughly seven times the global decline — while the share of workers describing themselves as "thriving" sits at 17 percent against a global rate of 34. The stated cause is not that firms became crueler but that they got flatter: large employers have trimmed middle-management layers (Quartz has chronicled the "decline of the fuddy-duddy Indian manager" at firms from Tata Motors to Infosys, and the ride-hailing company Cars24 recently abolished job titles entirely under a program it calls Flatland) without redefining what remained of the manager's job. The org chart got shorter. The deference did not.

Spain

Spain's Power Distance score of 57 describes something genuinely different: hierarchy that is acknowledged rather than revered. Cyborlink's summary of the same research notes that Spanish workplaces "recognize hierarchical differences but are increasingly comfortable challenging authority," particularly among younger staff — a courtesy rarely extended to an Indian boss mid-meeting. Spain's national statistics office, the INE, recorded average effective working hours at 31.7 a week in 2025 through its Labour Force Survey, the lowest figure since 2020 and down from 34.1 in 2015. The government has, since January 2024, been negotiating a statutory cut from 40 hours to 37.5 — via an interim step of 38.5 — according to Bloomberg Línea's reporting on talks between the government and the unions UGT and CCOO, against resistance from employers' federation CEOE. The OECD tracks hours worked across its member states, though, in a small, pointed irony for this particular comparison, India is not one of them, so Paris keeps no official ledger on how long an Indian desk stays occupied.

None of this means Spanish bosses are absent; it means authority is exercised informally rather than declared formally. The famous split working day — roughly 9 to 13:30, a long pause, then 16:30 or 17:00 to 20:00 — does more to flatten hierarchy than any policy memo, because for several hours every afternoon manager and managed are equally occupied with lunch. Decisions tend to arrive after relationship-building rather than before it: expatriate guides to Madrid describe meetings that drift from the agenda into open, occasionally loud debate, where trust built face to face outweighs anything circulated by email.

The Reckoning

Put the two systems side by side and the real difference is not how much power a boss holds, but how openly that power is allowed to be exercised. India's score of 77 produces a hierarchy that is explicit, personal, and performed: you call your manager by title, you let them speak first with the client, and you understand that when they take credit for your work, this is less betrayal than job description. Spain's score of 57 produces a hierarchy that is real but increasingly reluctant to say its own name: decisions still move largely top-down, but getting there runs through lunch, rapport, and a junior colleague's acknowledged right to push back in the room rather than mutiny quietly behind the boss's back.

For the person actually relocating, this cuts in opposite but equally inconvenient directions. Move to India and you will likely be told what to do more often, and asked for your opinion less — but you will also be shielded, mentored, and claimed by a boss who treats the team as something closer to a household, for better and worse. Move to Spain and you will be consulted more and protected less: the jefe expects you to manage your own outcomes, state your opinion out loud, and not expect anyone to notice, or mind, that you left at six. Neither arrangement is more "modern" than the other. They are simply different answers to the same question of where the discomfort is supposed to live.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — an engineer who had worked at Amazon in both the US and India described Indian managers there as operating almost like landlords over team culture and deadlines, with declining a 9pm call on short notice treated as a genuine career risk rather than a minor inconvenience.

Hacker News — a commenter advised that in strictly hierarchical workplaces, telling a manager no outright is simply not viable; the safer move, they said, is to agree in the moment and quietly not follow through, rather than refuse to a superior's face.

Reddit, via a Business Today report — a poster described managers in Indian-origin leadership abroad as carrying what they called a supremacist attitude, reserving high-visibility projects for IIT and IIM graduates and leaving everyone else feeling like hired help rather than colleagues.

Expat.com forum — a Dutch poster working across Spanish multinationals complained of too much hierarchy and bureaucracy for too little payoff, adding that colleagues rarely took their own initiative and that being well liked seemed to count for more than a strong CV.

Expat.com forum — another poster, pushing back on that same thread's pile-on, said not everyone in a Spanish office is coasting; what reads as low urgency is often a workplace that still rates a Saturday with family above a Monday deadline, and is not ashamed of the ordering.

Conclusion

If you are choosing between these two moves on the strength of hierarchy alone, choose based on which discomfort you can actually tolerate. India will give you more structure, more deference theater, and a boss who claims your idea in the meeting and then genuinely goes to bat for you that same afternoon; Gallup's engagement numbers suggest this arrangement is currently fraying at the edges, but it has not been dismantled. Spain will give you more room to disagree out loud, a working day built on the premise that lunch is not a break from life but the point of it, and a 37.5-hour week that, as of this writing, still exists mostly in committee rooms rather than contracts.

What neither country will give you is an office with no boss at all; Hofstede's numbers describe degrees of hierarchy, not its absence. Pack accordingly: in Mumbai, learn to read a head-waggle; in Madrid, learn to read a lunch invitation. Both, it turns out, are the same skill wearing different hats.