Two Ways to Make a Decision, and the Strain in Between
In a Dutch team, a decision waits until the objections run out. In a Korean team, the decision comes down and the work starts. Each side can read the other as inefficient.
Two reasonable complaints
To Korean colleagues, Dutch discussion looks slow. More people join it than the decision seems to need. Someone two levels down is debating a decision that, in their experience, belongs to the person accountable for it.
To Dutch colleagues, a Korean decision can look like it followed the title rather than the argument. The weight given to the most senior view looks out of proportion to the case being made.
Where the habits come from
Both patterns have long roots. Dutch consensus is often traced to the water boards, where villages of different rank had to agree to keep the land dry, and where one party refusing to cooperate put the rest at risk.
Korean hierarchy draws on Confucian order, reinforced by decades of rapid industrial growth in which speed of decision from the top was a real advantage.
These are conventional explanations rather than proven causes. They are a reasonable account of how each pattern came to be.
How the Culture Map describes it
Erin Meyer's Culture Map treats these as two separate scales: how leadership works, and how decisions get made. The Netherlands is egalitarian and consensual. Korea is hierarchical.
The Culture Map is a practitioner framework rather than a peer-reviewed study. It works best as a way of describing a difference, not as evidence for it.
What each system is actually good at
A Dutch decision takes longer to reach and tends to hold, because the discussion was the commitment. A Korean decision is reached quickly and gets adjusted as the work proceeds.
The effort sits at different points in the process. Trouble starts when people expect the effort where it does not fall, and read its absence as carelessness.
Where the strain actually sits
The difficulty in a mixed team is not the difference itself. It is sitting in a meeting without knowing what your part in it is.
Is this a discussion that will change the outcome, or a briefing on something already settled? Should you say what you think, or wait to be asked?
That uncertainty is what produces the silence. The silence is then read as the kind of person someone is. A similar gap shows up in weekly check-ins, where "I am fine" can mean different things to different people.
Reading the difference accurately
Most of what gets read as attitude in a mixed team is someone working out which rules apply.
Naming which system a decision is running on removes a good part of that confusion. Once that is clear, most of what felt personal turns out not to be.
Where a team is already stuck in the pattern, workplace mental health support for organisations can help the people involved see what is actually happening.
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands.
Sources: Erin Meyer's The Culture Map (2014) separates the Leading scale (egalitarian to hierarchical) from the Deciding scale (consensual to top-down). It is a practitioner framework rather than a peer-reviewed study. Meyer's Country Mapping Tool allows a direct comparison of two or more countries across the eight scales. The historical accounts of Dutch consensus and Korean hierarchy are conventional explanations rather than established causes.
