Editor’s Note:
This article was originally written by George B. Whitfield III during his time as a Technical Advisor with Executive Orientation Services. It has been substantially revised and expanded by the expat.or.id editorial team to reflect the realities of the modern Indonesian workplace.
What do your Indonesian colleagues really think of you? And what do you really think of them — if you are honest with yourself?
In any major international office, mutual politeness tends to keep these perceptions well below the surface. People are professional. Meetings are cordial. Emails are courteous. But underneath that professional surface, a set of deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about the other group is often quietly shaping how people interpret each other’s behaviour, how much trust they extend, and how effectively they actually work together.
George Whitfield explored this dynamic during his time advising multinational companies operating in Indonesia, and what he found was striking in its honesty. He asked Indonesian managers how they believed their expatriate colleagues perceived them, and he asked expatriate managers how they believed their Indonesian colleagues perceived them. The results, while uncomfortable, were illuminating.
The Mirror Exercise: What Each Side Sees
The Indonesian managers described themselves as they believed they were perceived by their expatriate co-workers:
Lazy, slow, inferior, polite, not punctual, lacking discipline, use feeling rather than logic, do not follow rules, corrupt, hypocritical, religious, resistant to change, too tolerant, low profile, unwilling to confront or deliver bad news, silent in meetings, incompetent.
The expatriate managers described themselves as they believed they were perceived by their Indonesian co-workers:
Egotistical, pushy, bossy, lacking in respect, rude, punctual, opportunistic, discriminatory, dismissive, ethnocentric, do things “my way”, democratic, hypocritical, indifferent and uncaring of others, high profile, proud, open, overconfident, smart, arrogant, follow the rules.
It is worth pausing on these lists. They are not descriptions of how individuals necessarily see each other — most people, on both sides, would reject many of these labels as unfair characterisations of their own group. What they represent instead are the inherited stereotypes that circulate within each community, passed from one colleague to the next, from one generation of expats to the next, often without anyone stopping to question whether they are accurate or fair.
And that is precisely the problem.
Why These Perceptions Persist
Culture is not something we are born with. It is absorbed through years of exposure to others from our own group, and it includes not just values and habits but assumptions about how other groups behave. When an Indonesian professional joins an international company and begins working alongside foreign managers, the informal guidance they receive from their national colleagues will often include some version of the stereotypes listed above. The same is true in reverse: when an expatriate arrives in Indonesia to take up a new posting, much of what they are told about how to work effectively here comes from other expatriates, many of whom have absorbed these same generalisations.
Without active intervention, these cycles are self-reinforcing. A Filipino-American manager interprets his Indonesian team’s silence in a meeting as passive resistance or lack of engagement. His Indonesian colleagues interpret his directness as aggression and a lack of respect for the room. Neither is wrong about what they observed. Both are wrong about what it means.
The Indonesian Workplace Has Changed — But Not Entirely
It is important to acknowledge that the Indonesian corporate landscape looks rather different today than it did when Whitfield’s original research was conducted. The binary of Western expatriate managers and Indonesian staff, while still present in many industries, is no longer the whole picture.
Jakarta’s major business districts now host significant communities of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian professionals, each bringing their own cultural frameworks and their own assumptions about hierarchy, communication and time. Bali has developed into a genuinely global hub for digital businesses and remote workers, with a workplace culture that can feel quite unlike anything else in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s own millennial and Gen Z professionals — many of them educated abroad or extensively connected to global networks through LinkedIn, international study and online work — often operate with assumptions that differ considerably from those of their parents’ generation.
The stereotype of the Indonesian employee who avoids confrontation, defers endlessly to seniority and never delivers bad news directly is still recognisable in some environments, particularly in more traditional industries and government-adjacent organisations. But in Indonesia’s fast-growing technology sector, in its creative industries, and in the younger cohorts of its major multinationals, you will encounter Indonesian professionals who are direct, ambitious, internationally minded and entirely comfortable pushing back on a proposal they disagree with — though usually still with more grace and indirectness than their Western counterparts.
The rise of hybrid and remote work since 2020 has added another layer of complexity. When cultural friction used to happen in a meeting room, both parties at least had access to body language, tone of voice and shared physical context. In a video call or a Slack thread, those cues disappear, and misreadings become easier and more consequential.
None of this means the original observations are obsolete. It means they need to be applied with more nuance, and that the solution — when it comes — must be designed for a more complex environment.
What You Can Do: Practical Steps for the Individual Expat
If you are waiting for your company’s HR department to solve this, you may be waiting a long time. The most effective cross-cultural relationships in any Indonesian workplace are built by individuals who take the initiative themselves. Here is where to start.
Invest in real cultural orientation before you need it. Not a one-afternoon briefing on “dos and don’ts”, but a genuine effort to understand some of the underlying values that shape Indonesian professional behaviour. Concepts like gotong royong — the tradition of mutual cooperation and communal effort — and musyawarah mufakat — decision-making through consensus and deliberation rather than majority vote — explain a great deal about why Indonesian teams can seem slow to decide and resistant to being pushed. They are not stalling. They are operating according to deeply held principles about how decisions should legitimately be made.
Do not mistake politeness for agreement, or silence for consent. This is the single most common and most costly misreading in the Indonesian workplace. When an Indonesian colleague says “yes” or nods along, they may mean “yes, I have heard you” rather than “yes, I agree” or “yes, I will do this.” If you need genuine buy-in, you need to build the kind of relationship where your colleague feels safe enough to tell you when something is not working. That relationship takes time and cannot be shortcut.
Learn at least basic Bahasa Indonesia. You do not need to become fluent to work effectively in Indonesia, but making the effort to learn — and being visibly unashamed about making mistakes — sends a signal of respect that is noticed and remembered. The Indonesian colleagues most likely to trust you and work openly with you are almost always those who believe you are genuinely interested in them and their country, not merely stationed here temporarily.
Understand that hierarchy is real and functions differently here. Indonesian organisations tend to be more hierarchical than Western ones, and the expectations around deference to seniority — in meetings, in written communications, in the allocation of credit for work — are meaningful. As an expatriate manager, you may feel you are being refreshingly egalitarian by insisting everyone call you by your first name and speak up freely in meetings. Your Indonesian colleagues may experience it differently: as a signal that you do not understand, or do not respect, how things work here. This does not mean you must abandon your own management values, but it does mean you need to be thoughtful about how you introduce them.
For Indonesian professionals working with expatriate managers, the most useful reframe is this: your foreign colleague’s directness is almost certainly not aggression or disrespect — it is simply how they were trained to communicate. In most Western business cultures, stating a problem bluntly and proposing a solution quickly is considered efficient and professional, not rude. Knowing this does not make the style comfortable, but it does make it less personal.
Build relationships outside the task. Indonesia is, at its core, a relationship-based business culture. The trust that makes professional collaboration work is built over meals, over small conversations, over remembering someone’s family situation or their hometown. Expatriates who skip straight to the agenda and skip the relationship-building often find that they have efficient meetings and ineffective outcomes. The two things are connected.
The Role of Management: Making It Structural, Not Individual
Individual goodwill can take a cross-cultural team a long way, but it cannot carry the whole weight. Companies that consistently get the best out of mixed Indonesian and expatriate teams tend to have a few things in common.
They make cross-cultural competence a leadership expectation, not a soft skill. Senior expatriate managers who visibly invest in understanding Indonesian culture — who learn the language, who participate in national celebrations, who engage seriously with their Indonesian counterparts as peers — set a tone that ripples through the organisation.
They create structured opportunities for both sides to surface and address stereotypes openly, in formats that feel psychologically safe. This might be a facilitated workshop, a joint project with mixed teams and shared accountability, or a regular forum where Indonesian and expatriate staff can raise friction points without it feeling like a complaint.
They review their performance management and communication systems to check whether they inadvertently disadvantage Indonesian employees whose cultural style is less visible, less assertive, or less immediately legible to a Western evaluator. Many Indonesian professionals who are described as “quiet in meetings” or “lacking leadership presence” are in fact thoughtful, effective and well-regarded by their Indonesian peers — they simply perform competence in a different register.
And increasingly, they think about cross-cultural dynamics not just in terms of Indonesian versus expatriate, but across all the cultural communities present in their workforce. A Korean team leader managing a mix of Indonesian, Indian and Australian staff is navigating a genuinely complex cultural environment, and the solutions need to match that complexity.
A Final Word
The stereotype lists that Whitfield gathered are uncomfortable to read. They are meant to be. Their value is not in confirming what you already suspected about the other side — it is in holding up a mirror and asking: is this what I am projecting? Is this what I am assuming? And what would happen if I chose, starting today, to act differently?
The Indonesian workplace, for all its complexity and occasional frustration, is one of the most genuinely rewarding professional environments in the world for those who take the time to understand it properly. The relationships you build here, across cultural lines, can be among the most durable and meaningful of your career.
That outcome, though, does not happen by accident. It happens because someone — usually an individual, sometimes an organisation — decided to take the mirror seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions: Working Across Cultures in Indonesia
Why do Indonesian colleagues often avoid saying no directly?
In Indonesian culture, maintaining harmony and preserving face — for both parties — takes priority over blunt communication. A direct “no” risks embarrassing the person making the request, which is considered impolite. Instead, you may hear “it might be difficult”, “we will see what we can do”, or simply a long silence. Learning to read these signals — and creating a relationship where your colleague feels safe enough to be more direct with you — is one of the most important skills an expatriate manager in Indonesia can develop.
How important is hierarchy in Indonesian business culture?
Very important, particularly in traditional industries and larger organisations. Seniority — whether based on age, title or length of service — commands genuine respect, and decisions are often made at the top rather than delegated downward. As an expatriate manager, you may find that your Indonesian team is reluctant to act on something until they have clear direction from above, and that decisions which seem straightforward to you require more consultation than you expected. This is not inefficiency — it reflects a considered approach to authority and collective accountability.
Is it worth learning Bahasa Indonesia for work?
Even a basic level of Bahasa Indonesia has a disproportionate positive effect on your working relationships. It signals that you are invested in being here, not just passing through. It enables direct conversations with staff who are not comfortable in English. And it gives you access to a great deal of informal communication — the lunchtime conversations, the comments made under someone’s breath in a meeting — that is invisible to expatriates who rely entirely on English. You do not need fluency. You need enough to show that you tried.
How has remote and hybrid work changed cross-cultural dynamics in Indonesia?
Significantly. Many of the relationship-building cues that smooth cross-cultural communication in an office — shared meals, incidental conversations, reading body language in meetings — are absent in a remote environment. Indonesian professionals who are less comfortable speaking up in formal video calls may become effectively invisible to foreign managers who are assessing performance on the basis of meeting participation. If you are managing a hybrid team in Indonesia, you need to find deliberate alternative ways to build rapport and hear from quieter voices.
What is the biggest mistake expatriate managers make in Indonesia?
Moving too fast and listening too little. The pressure to deliver results quickly is real, but the trust-building phase that Indonesian business culture requires is not negotiable — it can only be shortened, not skipped. Expatriates who arrive with a strong agenda and try to implement it immediately, without first taking the time to understand the existing relationships, loyalties and informal power structures within their team, frequently find that things are agreed to in meetings and then quietly not implemented. Slowing down at the beginning almost always leads to faster results in the end.
Originally written by George B. Whitfield III, Technical Advisor, Executive Orientation Services. Revised and expanded by the expat.or.id editorial team, June 2026.
