Elias took a request from his manager before a request from his coworker, and his coworker was furious.

“My coworker was visibly upset because I didn’t immediately attend to her request. In my culture, we deeply respect hierarchy, so a manager’s task automatically takes precedence; it’s instinctual. However, I failed to explain this cultural rule to her; I simply assumed she would understand. She perceived my delay in action as me ignoring her or not supporting her, which was wrong. I clearly learned the importance of better communication.”

Two people, one small moment, two completely different readings of it. She saw a colleague who would not help her. He was following a rule so deep he had never had to say it out loud.

The puzzle

Nothing in that exchange was rude. Nothing in it was even conscious. That is what makes it worth examining: the most consequential cultural differences at work are rarely arguments about values. They are ordinary decisions made instantly, by instinct, that get read by someone else as a statement about them.

Mona, the Lebanese homecare aide, once shared food with her coworkers as she would have at home, and found that it violated the organization’s policy. She thought the rule was cold. She followed it anyway. “I respect the rules.”

The idea

Power distance, in Hofstede’s terms, describes the extent to which people expect and accept that power is distributed unequally — how instinctively a society defers to hierarchy. In high power distance societies, inequalities are expected and accepted, which produces both deference to authority and adherence to hierarchical structure. Canadian workplaces sit at the other end: flat, informal, uncomfortable with visible rank.

An immigrant worker moving between the two is not moving between right and wrong. They are moving between two systems, each of which has a name for the other’s behaviour. From one side, deference looks like professionalism. From the other, it looks like passivity.

What the research found

Participants showed high affinity for formality, recognition of authoritative roles, and top-down communication patterns. And this natural inclination toward obedience to perceived superiors was sometimes misinterpreted by Canadian coworkers as a lack of cooperation or initiative.

But there was a second layer, one the framework does not fully anticipate. Deference was given to age as well as to rank. Older customers received noticeably more generosity and patience. Elias described being caught off guard by it:

“Back home, in Lebanon, we have a lot of respect for elderly people. It’s just automatic for me… My manager showed me a feedback form in which an older customer said I was very kind to her. My manager had to show it to me — I didn’t expect that. But for me, it’s just normal. This is how we treat older people at home.”

He was surprised that something he had not noticed doing had been noticed by someone else. That is the signature of a value that has become invisible to the person holding it.

And then the complication, which matters more than the pattern. Bassam — fifty, Syrian, a lawyer before he was a coffee shop worker — preferred the Canadian way:

“Something I appreciate about Canada is that supervisors and staff are on equal footings, both treat each other with respect. However, it is not uncommon in an Arab workplace that senior employees look down with arrogance or disrespect to their subordinates. I never liked such an attitude as I value the mutual respect I receive here in Canada.”

Several participants said versions of this. They gave positive feedback on egalitarian work practices and saw them as a gate to personal growth and career development. The narratives show that participants were flexible enough to think and weigh their options rather than blindly obeying their seniors.

What it means

Power distance among these workers is not rigid or one-dimensional. Deference to authority was the default: supervisors’ requests came first, older customers received more care, and both patterns traced back to upbringing. But the orientation was not absolute. Participants held high and low power distance orientations at the same time and moved between them depending on context and on who was in front of them.

Deference to elderly customers adds an age-based layer to the power distance dimension that Hofstede’s original framework doesn’t always cover. Participants treated elderly customers with markedly more respect purely because of their age, reflecting cultural backgrounds in which elders hold authority by virtue of years.

Power distance in immigrant workers, on this evidence, is better understood as flexible and context-dependent than as a fixed dimension. That is a small correction to a very large framework, and it comes from fourteen people describing their working days.

Why it matters

High power distance orientations do not actually contradict the Canadian service environment. They produce an intrinsic sensitivity to authority and a strong willingness to deliver on instruction. The problem is that such deference is either unrewarded or in conflict with egalitarian expectations.

The practical action is to teach managers and team leaders that deference in immigrant employees is a cultural behaviour, not an expression of passivity or an absence of initiative. Supervisors should give clear and direct instructions rather than relying on implicit cues, because high power distance employees are more confident when expectations are explicit. At the same time, organizations can create safe opportunities for egalitarian communication — team meetings where every voice is genuinely expected to be heard — so that workers can change at their own pace instead of being pushed to abandon core values.

Both things can be true at once: a worker can honour their manager instinctively and still come to prefer a workplace where nobody is looked down on. Several of these fourteen do.