Comment by JamesBarney
3 years ago
I've definitely seen teams that were low functioning because they were so worried about consensus and upsetting someone else that no one ever criticized any decisions any team member made even if they were both impactful and objectively terrible.
This is worse
You've just described Japanese work culture.
That’s too cliche. As a counterpoint, HP and IBM are US firms and also get no shit done. And Japanese groups have their share of jerks, in spades.
Issue is not jerks vs consensus, it’s way more complicated than that.
If you mean cliché as in "widespread and pre-eminent" then I agree, because that it's a fair description of Japanese work culture. The jerk side of it is taken care of by the hierarchy, those who are above you may be a jerk to you, and those on a similar level will instead use passive aggressive tactics but are incredibly unlikely to be a Torvalds style jerk.
If you want to point out where the extra complication is, I'd love to know.
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