The Good Father and the Dienstweg: Romania vs. Germany

🇷🇴 Romania · 🇩🇪 Germany

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Romania, a good boss is traditionally understood as something close to a protective father figure, someone who shields subordinates from blame in exchange for loyal deference. In Germany, a good boss is someone whose authority rests entirely on demonstrable expertise, "Fachkompetenz," and who would never dream of skipping your direct supervisor to reach you — that's not efficiency, that's a breach of the Dienstweg. Both cultures take hierarchy extremely seriously. They just can't agree on what it's for.

Do's & Don'ts

🇷🇴 Romania

🇩🇪 Germany

Romania: Hierarchy as Protection, Trust as Scarce Resource

Hofstede Insights scores Romania at 90 on power distance — strikingly high even by regional standards — and a steep 85 on uncertainty avoidance, a profile that tracks closely with the management culture documented by Romania-Insider contributor Irina Budrina: under the pre-1989 system, decision-making power sat with a few people and was "often used arbitrarily," and the instinct that direction should flow from above, paired with real fear of punishment for mistakes, outlasted the political system that produced it. The traditional ideal of the manager as a "good father figure" isn't incidental to this — it's the logical adaptation to a system where strict hierarchy, accepted in exchange for a measure of security, became the safer bet than individual initiative.

The trust deficit this produced is, by Budrina's account, still measurable in daily behavior: "information was a commodity to be hoarded and traded" under the old system, and Romanian managers in a team are, even now, "often wary of each other" rather than instinctively cooperative. None of this makes Romanian offices dysfunctional — the country's genuinely international management layer (roughly 4 in 10 general managers are foreign, per a CareerAdvisor study, with most averaging close to two decades of professional experience) suggests the system absorbs outside leadership reasonably well. But it does mean a manager accustomed to open brainstorming and shared ownership will find Romanian teams defaulting instead to individual briefings, careful information-sharing, and meetings that, as the same commentary notes, outside observers have historically found "lengthy and inconclusive" precisely because responsibility isn't being distributed in the room the way a Western playbook assumes it should be.

The generational layer matters here too, and it's shifting faster than the Hofstede numbers alone would suggest. Romania's EU accession and two decades of Western outsourcing investment have produced a younger management cohort trained inside multinational structures rather than the old state system, and that cohort is visibly more comfortable with open feedback and shared accountability than the father-figure model their own former managers grew up under. The practical effect for an arriving employee is that "Romanian management culture" increasingly means two different things depending on the specific company's age and ownership — a legacy domestic firm and a decade-old multinational subsidiary in the same city can feel like entirely different hierarchies.

Germany: Hierarchy as Formal Accountability

Germany's Hofstede profile inverts Romania's almost point for point: power distance drops to 35, while uncertainty avoidance stays substantial at 65 — Germans aren't comfortable with ambiguity, but the discomfort gets resolved through process and expertise rather than deference to a boss's personal authority. Authority in a German workplace, per a detailed breakdown from Germanyhandbook.com, rests on "Fachkompetenz" — demonstrated subject-matter competence — rather than charisma or title, and the Dienstweg, the official chain of command, is taken seriously enough that going over your direct supervisor's head to reach a senior leader is read as a genuine breach of etiquette, not an efficient shortcut.

What makes this especially tricky for an arriving foreign manager is that a title earned elsewhere often doesn't transfer. A widely read essay by Susanna on building a management career in Germany lays out the mechanics bluntly: German leadership roles come bundled with specific, formal accountability — hiring, performance reviews, legal responsibility, budget authority — so a "Director" title from abroad reads as marketing rather than substance until the actual duties match it locally. Direct, top-down management style is explicitly unwelcome; teams expect consensus-building and genuine technical depth, and real decisions, per Germanyhandbook.com, tend to happen quietly in pre-meetings or circulation procedures well before the formal meeting where the outcome gets presented as already settled. A Blind contributor who spent 18 months at a German IBM office summed up the friction from the outside bluntly, calling the posting "painful" and citing bureaucracy as the single dominant feature of daily work.

The works council adds a formal check that has no real Romanian equivalent. Germanyhandbook.com notes that any company with more than five permanent employees typically has a Betriebsrat with genuine co-determination rights, and management decisions that bypass it can be challenged directly in labor court — which means a German manager's authority, however procedurally correct, is itself subject to a second, worker-elected layer of institutional oversight that a Romanian manager, answerable mainly upward rather than to an elected body of peers, simply doesn't have to navigate.

The Reckoning

The real divide isn't about how much hierarchy exists — Romania and Germany both maintain real, serious hierarchy — it's about what the hierarchy is actually accountable for. Romania's version protects people; Germany's version protects process. A Romanian employee moved to a German office can mistake the lack of a protective, father-figure boss for coldness, when it's really just authority relocated from the person to the role. A German manager moved to Romania can mistake one-on-one, individually managed relationships for a lack of teamwork, when it's really a rational response to a trust environment that hasn't always rewarded open collaboration. Both are hierarchies. Neither one is simply "more hierarchical" than the other — they're hierarchical about different things.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

teamblind.com — An IBM contributor who spent 18 months in Germany called the posting "painful" and their least favorite assignment anywhere, describing endless "bureaucracy bureaucracy bureaucracy" and noting that strict labor protections kept older managers in place for years regardless of output — leaving them with the impression that little actually got accomplished despite everyone being busy.

todaysoftmag.com — Razvan Gai, a project manager at a Romanian software firm, pushed back on the idea that a manager holds power at all, arguing instead that "there is no power, only responsibility," and that leadership on a technical team is self-made through consistent, narrow focus rather than granted by title — "do one job and one job only and well."

susannakis.substack.com — In an essay on German management careers, the author noted that leadership positions in Germany are frequently filled through internal referral rather than open hiring, and that a foreign leader's credibility is built slowly through demonstrated reliability — bold vision or persuasive pitching, she writes, carries noticeably less weight locally than steady, proven competence.

Advice worth having before you land: in Romania, invest in the individual relationship with your direct manager before expecting the team to self-organize — that's not how trust gets built there. In Germany, never skip your supervisor to reach someone more senior, however urgent it feels; the Dienstweg is not a suggestion.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two for how you'll actually be managed, the honest framing is: Romania will give you a boss who feels responsible for you personally, for better and worse, and Germany will give you a process that's responsible for the outcome regardless of who you personally are. The thing I'd tell a friend over a drink: in Bucharest, earn your manager's trust one quiet conversation at a time; in Berlin, earn the system's trust by never, ever going around it.