from AndyJS - You obviously haven't paid any attention to, for example, Geert Hofstede's work on Power Distance. South American countries have some of the highest ratings on this scale, just as high as many Asian countries. A high Power Distance rating basically means it's extremely difficult for subordinates to challenge the person in charge in any given situation.
Authority gradient issues may well turn out to be a factor, but be very cautious about using Hofstede's work on Power-Distance Index in this context. It is very general and not necessarily applicable to the pilot community.
Hofstede's data was prominently used by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book "Outliers" to promote his "ethnic theory of plane crashes" which he summarises as "The single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it is the [national] culture the pilot comes from". He used 2 particular accidents to demonstrate this - Avianca B707 fuel exhaustion New York which has already been mentioned in some media as being like this accident, and Korean Air CFIT at Guam.
There are often generalisations on PPrune about accidents in particular parts of the world quoting specific pilot groups as susceptible to high Power-Distance index etc. and Hofstede is sometimes used to justify them, in order to show that some cultures are inherently less safe than others.
For example the useful reference AndyJS provides goes on to say "Subsequent studies validating the earlier results include such respondent groups as commercial airline pilots and students in 23 countries, civil service managers in 14 counties, 'up-market' consumers in 15 countries and 'elites' in 19 countries."
This implies you can take Hofstede's statements about a national culture as being applicable to all pilots from that country. The actual study of pilots PDI was by Ashleigh Merritt, a colleague of well known CRM expert Bob Helmreich. Gladwell specifically refers to it as justifying his "theory" but he seriously misreports it.
The study actually noted that many factors make commercial pilots DIFFERENT to the general populations studied by Hofstede. Merritt's paper validated that Hofstede's research methods could be applicable to pilots, but went on to show that the actual results for pilots could then be very different to the general populations.
So while many people think Hofstede says for example that all Korean pilots have high PDI and American pilots very low PDI, the research showed are actually very similar.
The four elements of Merritt's study are shown below. Ashleigh confirmed a few months ago that these graphs of her data are valid, and went on to say "Why Gladwell made that huge leap from a couple of accidents to his "theory" is beyond me."
