The Email Is the Feedback: Reviews in Taiwan and Indonesia

🇹🇼 Taiwan · 🇮🇩 Indonesia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

An expat manager working with staff across greater Chinese business culture put it plainly: "My colleagues freak out when I give them constructive criticism." The fix wasn't to soften the words — it was to stop saying them out loud at all, and send an email instead. Indonesia runs a parallel but distinct protocol: feedback arrives by "beating around the bush," wrapped in enough context and goodwill that the actual critique has to be inferred rather than stated. Both cultures agree that direct, Western-style performance feedback is a minor act of violence. They've just built different padding around it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇹🇼 Taiwan

🇮🇩 Indonesia

Taiwan: criticism as a private transaction

Taiwanese and broader greater-Chinese business culture treats direct criticism as something closer to a social injury than a management tool, and the workaround that expat managers consistently land on is channel-switching rather than tone-softening: move the correction out of spoken conversation entirely. One expat's account of managing local colleagues describes the realization directly — "My colleagues freak out when I give them constructive criticism" — followed by a practical fix of sending emails with instructions or framing corrections as management preferences, never personal judgments. The same dynamic runs in reverse for praise: individual recognition is often met with passive, modest deflection, not because employees don't want credit, but because claiming it individually cuts against collective workplace values.

The practical upshot for a foreign manager or new hire is that Taiwan's formal performance-review paperwork and its actual day-to-day feedback loop are doing two different jobs. The written review can be candid because it's private and channel-appropriate; the spoken interaction stays smooth because it has to carry the relationship, not just the evaluation. Reading only one of those channels gives you half the picture.

Indonesia: the vocabulary of not-quite-saying-it

Jakarta's office culture runs on an explicit hierarchy — honorifics matter, deference to age and seniority is structural, not optional — layered under an equally explicit harmony norm. Guides to local business etiquette describe Indonesian professionals as preferring to "beat around the bush" rather than deliver blunt feedback, and to "avoid confrontations, preferring to settle conflicts quietly in private" rather than air disagreement in a group setting. The mechanism is "face" in both directions: giving it generously through public compliments and visible respect for seniors, and protecting it carefully by keeping anything critical out of public view.

What makes this genuinely tricky for a newly arrived professional isn't the indirection itself — most cultures have some — it's the added layer that career advancement in Jakarta runs heavily on relationship capital. The guides are blunt about it: "who you know is more important than what you know" for raises and promotions, which means the soft, relationship-first feedback style isn't just etiquette, it's load-bearing for how your actual career outcomes get decided.

The Reckoning

Taiwan and Indonesia solve the same problem — how to deliver unwelcome truth without rupturing the relationship — through almost opposite mechanics. Taiwan's solution is largely architectural: build a separate, private, often written channel for the hard truths, and keep the face-to-face interaction smooth. Indonesia's solution is linguistic: keep everything in the same spoken channel, but encode the actual message in softened phrasing that both parties are expected to decode correctly.

The trap for an outsider is assuming these are the same "Asian indirectness" stereotype wearing two different outfits. They aren't: in Taiwan, the silence in a conversation can mean the feedback already happened somewhere else (an email you should check); in Indonesia, the silence can mean the feedback is happening right now, encoded in a sentence you just didn't fully parse. Treating them interchangeably — waiting for the Indonesian email that isn't coming, or digging for the blunt Taiwanese verbal confirmation that was never going to arrive — is the single most common way newcomers in both countries conclude, wrongly, that they got no feedback at all.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

eChinaCities (expat career-advice column) — A manager working with Chinese-cultural-context colleagues described learning to route all constructive criticism through email specifically because in-person correction caused visible distress, and found that reframing notes as "management preference" rather than personal fault let the same information land without the shame response.

eChinaCities (expat career-advice column) — The same account flagged the inverse problem as equally real: public praise, meant warmly, triggered visible discomfort in colleagues who preferred credit distributed collectively, pushing the manager toward quiet, one-on-one acknowledgment instead of team-meeting recognition.

Blind (teamblind.com, Asian-vs-American management threads) — Professionals comparing management styles across Asian and American firms repeatedly converged on one practical distinction: direct, specific, "here's exactly what to improve" feedback common in American performance reviews reads, in several Asian corporate contexts, as unusually blunt rather than simply efficient — a framing gap more than a values gap.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Taiwan, check your email before concluding you received no feedback — the real review may already be sitting in your inbox, reframed as a process note. If you're moving to Indonesia, learn to hear "perhaps another approach" as a complete sentence rather than an opening for debate, and invest in relationships well before you need the feedback conversation to go well. The honest version I'd give a friend: in both countries, the silence you're worried about isn't the absence of an opinion — it's the opinion, delivered in a dialect you haven't learned yet.