When a Korean company sets up in the Netherlands, the market is rarely the hard part
When a Korean company sets up in the Netherlands, most of the early planning goes into the market. Customers, competitors, pricing, the first hires. Yet for many Korean companies in the Netherlands, the market is not where the real difficulty starts. The harder gap sits between two ways of running a workplace, and it usually surfaces only once the team is in place and working. This article looks at what the research says about that gap, what it looks like day to day, and what actually helps.
What the research actually found
This is not only a matter of anecdote. A peer-reviewed study interviewed Dutch and Korean managers inside Korean firms operating in the Netherlands, and set out to describe a specific problem. A foreign firm carries extra difficulties a local one does not, simply because it is foreign. Researchers call this the liability of foreignness.
The study did something useful with the idea. Rather than leaving it as a vague sense of friction, it located the difficulty in four concrete sources.
The first was cross-border transfer, the work of moving practices and ways of operating from headquarters into a different setting. The second was dealing with local institutions and government, where an incoming firm has to learn rules a local company already knows by heart. The third was local discrimination, the reality that a foreign firm is not always treated on equal terms with local ones. The fourth, and the one closest to daily working life, was the relationship inside the company itself, between the local team and head office.
That fourth source is where I spend most of my time, so it is worth slowing down on.
What it looks like day to day
So what does the liability of foreignness look like on an ordinary day? Often it looks like nothing dramatic at all.
A Dutch team treats directness as normal, and reads it as a sign of respect and engagement. To head office, hierarchy and deference are just as normal, and just as much a sign of respect. Both sides then read the other through their own rules. Both quietly judge the other for behaviour that feels obvious at home. Neither side is doing anything wrong. They are simply working from different scripts, and nobody handed either of them the other one.
Left unspoken, that mismatch does not stay at the level of style. It settles on individual people. Korean staff can find themselves struggling inside a Dutch system they were never really introduced to. Dutch staff can feel unheard by a head office they rarely reach. In both cases the strain is real, and in both cases people tend to carry it alone, because naming it can feel like complaining about the culture itself.
Why standard support tends to miss
This is where ordinary workplace support falls short. Most wellbeing provision is built around one set of assumptions, usually the local one. It rarely accounts for an employee who is managing a second cultural system on top of the job itself. So the Korean employee and the Dutch employee, sitting on opposite sides of the same gap, are both offered support that fits neither of them well.
The same study points at how firms reduce the liability over time. Two responses stood out. One was localisation, adapting to how things are done in the host country. The other was reducing unfamiliarity, closing the distance between what each side knows and expects. Both are, at their core, about understanding. And understanding is not only a matter of policy or process. It reaches people directly, or it does not reach them at all.
What makes the difference
This is the part I see in practice. Support that works in this setting has to hold both sides at once. It has to make sense to a Korean employee navigating Dutch directness, and to a Dutch employee trying to be heard by a Korean head office. That is not a nicety added on top of the setup. It is part of what makes the setup hold.
This is the work I do with Korean and headquarters-led teams in the Netherlands. Through Tea with Kelly's support for organisations, I help companies close the gap before it turns into sick leave or quiet turnover, with workplace support and counselling delivered in both English and Korean. For individual staff carrying the strain on either side, one-to-one counselling offers a place to work it through with someone who understands both systems.
Handled well, two ways of working can strengthen a company rather than strain it. The difference usually comes down to whether the gap was named early and supported, or left for individual people to absorb quietly.
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands. About Kelly.
Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/12265080701217165
