Power Distance in Romania

Romania is among the 10% of the most power distant countries, more precisely it scores 90, which is the 7th position regarding the most power distance societies in the world as for instance Latin American countries and countries of South-eastern Asia and Eastern Europe. This is underlined by the fact that the country is extremely centralized: 2/3 of all foreign investments go into the capital city Bucharest where also 80% of all financial potential is concentrated. There are a lot of backgrounds to the high PDI in Romania. The main reason is that the Romanian culture with its emphasis on authority figures, subjugation to the Communist Party elite has bred a legacy of high power distance in the populace and in Romanian managers and workers.
Big PDI means that Romania has a big power separation between the rich and poor which are also known as high power distance between people. Basically if you are born into a family with power you will have a high possibility to keep that power but if you’re born into a family who is poor, it is really hard to move up and you will continue to be poor. Even if nowadays we can observe a decreasing trend in the power distance of Romania, I think it’s still very high. Current situation leads to the numerous negative consequences. For example, the majority of salary-earning workers have open-ended working days or injurious conditions of work. The huge discrepancy between the less and the more powerful people leads to a great importance of status symbols.
Behavior has to reflect and represent the status roles in all areas of business interactions: visits, negotiations or cooperation; the approach should be top-down and provide clear mandates for any task. Another thing is that everything is by the book. They deadlines are strict and solid and you usually don’t have a personal relationship with your boss. Most business CEO’s or people with power is very totalitarian. They have to have total power over everything and must always be in control of the situation. They don’t care what other people say or feel about the situation. People like to abuse their power because the subordinates or people who are under them can’t do anything about it because they can get in trouble. All they can do is try to fix the problem.
However, as mentioned above, I see this trend decreasing. As we are moving forward from the Communist regime and trying to adapt to the Western societies and the European Union the things become more promising. The influence of the West, by giving us some examples, will help us to decrease the dimension of power distance.

Hegyi Magor Péter
Comparative Mangement Homework 2.