Who's the Boss? A Field Guide to Surviving Management in Manila and Amman

🇵🇭 Philippines · 🇯🇴 Jordan

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the Philippines, half the workforce reports feeling stressed on any given day — the highest rate in Southeast Asia — and yet Filipino employees also report the region's highest engagement, a combination that makes sense only once you understand that the boss is often also, functionally, family. In Jordan, meanwhile, a widely quoted statistic claims women hold 62 percent of managerial jobs, a figure so flattering that the International Labour Organization felt obliged to issue a public correction. Both countries have hierarchies. Neither hierarchy behaves the way an org chart suggests.

Do's & Don'ts

🇵🇭 Philippines

🇯🇴 Jordan

In the Philippines, hierarchy is steep but warm. The Hofstede Insights power-distance score for the Philippines sits among the highest in the world, reflecting a workplace where titles matter, elders are deferred to, and a boss's word carries weight well beyond the job description. What softens that steepness is a cultural expectation — documented repeatedly in Philippine HR literature, including Manila Recruitment's own breakdown of local management norms — that a good manager behaves less like a supervisor and more like a parental figure: firm on deadlines, flexible on personal emergencies, and careful to deliver criticism privately so no one loses face in front of colleagues. The Gallup figures bear out the tension this creates: Filipino workers report both the highest stress levels and the highest engagement in Southeast Asia, a pairing that reads less like contradiction and more like the cost of a system where loyalty is earned face-to-face and burnout is often invisible until it isn't.

That hierarchy also runs on obligation. The concept of utang na loob — a debt of gratitude that binds employee to employer long after the paycheck clears — means a boss who mentors you, covers for your mistake once, or helps your family in an emergency has bought real loyalty, not just goodwill. New arrivals used to transactional Western management often misread this as inefficiency. It isn't; it's a different ledger. The Philippine Statistics Authority's long-running Survey on Overseas Filipinos shows just how much of the country's labor force has already tested this ledger abroad — including a well-documented, if periodically suspended, corridor of workers into Jordan — which means your new Filipino colleague may have more cross-cultural management experience than you do.

Jordan's hierarchy looks steeper on an org chart and is, in practice, more negotiable than it appears — provided you know which informal network to go through. Academic research on Jordanian workplaces (including published studies on "relational gatekeeping" by HR managers) describes wasta, personal and family connection, as a parallel structure running alongside formal authority, shaping who gets hired, promoted, or simply heard in a meeting. The ILO's own data complicates the rosier headlines: initial reporting claimed women hold 62 percent of Jordanian management jobs, but once school principals are excluded, the ILO found only 2.7 percent of women work as junior or senior managers outside the education sector — a correction worth remembering before citing Jordan as a gender-equity management success story. Female labor-force participation nationally sits at just 14 percent against 54 percent for men, per the same reporting, and Jordan ranks 149th of 153 countries on that measure.

Day-to-day, Jordanian management runs on relationship before task, much like the Philippines, but the relationship that matters most is frequently with someone other than your direct supervisor. Jordan News reporting on private hospitals captured this starkly: nurses described going months without pay while absorbing administrative duties that cut into patient care, with the professional body representing them pushing complaints up through the Ministry of Labour rather than resolving them department by department. The lesson for an incoming foreign employee is the same lesson that research on expatriate managers in Jordan keeps landing on: formal title gets you a seat, but real traction comes from cultivating the right informal sponsor.

The Reckoning

Here is the twist a brochure would never print: both cultures run on personal loyalty rather than process, but they reward it through opposite mechanisms. In the Philippines, loyalty flows upward and downward through the same person — your boss is your patron and your buffer, and the relationship is vertical but intimate. In Jordan, loyalty flows sideways through networks that may have nothing to do with the formal chain of command, meaning your actual influence often depends on relatives, tribe, or connections your org chart never mentions. A Western manager who builds rapport with a direct report in Manila gets a loyal employee. The same manager building rapport with a direct report in Amman may discover that the person who actually unblocks their project is someone three departments over whom they've never formally met.

The other inversion: Filipino workplace culture absorbs stress quietly and privately — the Gallup numbers on stress and engagement are two sides of a system that keeps strain invisible until someone resigns or breaks down. Jordanian workplace friction, by contrast, tends to surface publicly and structurally, through labor unions, press coverage of unpaid wages, and formal ministry complaints, because the informal networks that solve problems quietly for the well-connected leave everyone else no private channel at all.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

7iber — a Jordanian independent outlet's reporting described Filipina domestic workers seeking refuge at their embassy over complaints of overwork and poor treatment by employers, with officials and advocates disagreeing over whether the fault lay with cultural adjustment or with working conditions themselves.

Jordan News — a named nurse at a private Amman hospital recounted going two months without pay, while a colleague at a public hospital described administrative duties piling onto clinical staff until there was little time left for patients.

Manila Recruitment — HR practitioners who manage Filipino teams noted that direct public criticism routinely backfires, while private one-on-one check-ins surface problems that staff would otherwise never raise in a group setting.

Maybe The Way (Substack) — a foreign founder who hired a Philippines-based team directly, rather than through an outsourcing firm, found far higher loyalty and institutional memory, crediting a locally promoted team lead — affectionately nicknamed "Boss" by former colleagues — with holding the operation together.

Expat.com Jordan forum — a poster described recalibrating entirely around "Arabic time," where lateness that would read as unprofessional elsewhere is simply the accepted rhythm of meetings and workdays.

Conclusion

If you are choosing between these two moves on management culture alone, the real question is not "how hierarchical is it" — both are, by most measures, more hierarchical than wherever you're leaving — but "whose approval do I actually need." In the Philippines, that answer is almost always your direct boss, so invest in that one relationship and the system will largely work for you. In Jordan, that answer may be someone adjacent to your official chain entirely, so invest in reading the room before you invest in the org chart. Bring patience for indirectness either way, but bring a translator for who really holds the wasta.

The honest version, for a friend over a drink: in Manila you win by making your boss like you; in Amman you win by making friends with your boss's cousin.