Bert hamminga Power       version date 991207            Questions
Different Capitalist Cultures     Cultural diversity table     

Some people, it was asked in the HTT questionnaires to the managers, think that a boss usually is the one who knows best how to do the work. Others think the boss usually is the one whose power is the greatest. What do you think? The answers are generally anomalous. (7. Performance < power). The ranking is anomalous, but most countries are close.  The extremely low ranks (performance) are occupied by Germany, US and Singapore, the extreme high rank (power) by Japan. The high ranks in the tight main group have UK, Australia and the Netherlands. Perhaps the only significant result is outlayer Japan. Hampden Turner and Trompenaars offer as an explanation for Japan: in Japan, power is not "dirty". Everybody accepts that you need power to be a good boss, so if you do not have it, people do not want you to be boss. So, power is not "dirty" in Japan.
I will add some personal speculations on what could explain differences:  in most countries power is dirty, especially if it overpowers abilities. Then, then question becomes: is the person answering the question an optimist or a pessimist. If he is an optimist, if his own career goes well, he will tend to optimistically think performance generally wins over power. If his progress in life lags severely behind his ambitions, he needs an explanation for his own failure. In cultures where power is thought dirty, losers like to explain their loss by power. It reconciles the positive idea they want to have about their own abilities with the lagging of their career. This would suggest that Australia and The Netherlands top in relative frequency of frustrated losers, and US, Germany and Singapore are countries where people's careers follow their own expectations to the greatest extent.

But the main problem with questions concerning power is how it is formulated in the different languages. "Power" is a word that refers to highly culture specific ideas. Even the most obvious translations in languages closely related to English (French: "pouvoir", German:"Macht") lead to clear shifts of meaning once you get precise about it. Despite what dictionaries usually say, "power" is neither "pouvoir" nor "Macht". One could write long about these differences. African languages use terms best to be translated in English by ''power", but with a much wider meaning than the English terms. To the African the world consists of  "powers" rather than things. The HTT dilemma (capabilities or power) is incomprehensible to an African because capability and power are to them the same. What word is used in Japanese, prompting Japanese to massively opt for power as the main desideratum for a manager?

One aspect of power that is often involved in "power" discussions is the ability to influence the behaviour of people able to influence the things you want to happen. Let us call this network control. In different cultures you have different types of networks, hence different ways to gain (by luck or craft)  network control. The business managers' network may consists chiefly of business people, or of a mixture of business people and administrative officials of all levels ranging from local municipality officials to members of the government. In different cultures, administrative officials have different tasks, responsibilities and   competence. That makes power, even if restricted to the issue of network control an extremely difficult subject to treat generally.

Some network information can be derived from the employer loyalty under stress dilemma (HTT question 11) Extreme firm loyalty transpires in Japan and Germany. Extreme loyalty to private friendships is found in Singaporese and Italian answers, followed by French and Swedes. That could mean that in the right extreme people feel their network control mainly depends on the business network (Japan, Germany), and in the left extreme the "private" network is considered more important. But what is "private"? From Italians and Chinese, the more than average importance of family networks is well known. That explains the predominance of family owned businesses, since in a society tied by family loyalties the interests of private firms owned by a disparate, partly anonymous set of shareholders, like you typically find them in Anglo-Saxon countries, are in constant danger to be sacrificed to the more important family loyalties. I have no satisfactory explanation for the extreme right position in this question of Japan, where capital also tends to divide along family lines, and the same holds for Germany, where firms are also to a more than average degree consistently owned by families. Yet, the answers on the HTT questions suggest that in Germany the firm is thought to provide the main network grip, not the "private" relation. It seems the question should have been posed twice, one time as a dilemma between "private" friends and your company, the second time between relatives and your company. In cultures where companies  are predominantly family-owned the second  dilemma will be meaningless to family members with managing functions.