I've spent much of my life in a poor, developing country, and in my experience there is a huge difference in how people perceive formal structures in general, but power dynamics in particular. People in charge tend to be more authoritarian, and people in lower positions tend to be more subservient and they do exactly as they're told and no more than that.

Except for the ones who have a really obvious stake in the structure's success (owners usually), the thing people in each of these positions have in common is that they do not perceive themselves as individual, autonomous actors with responsibilities, but rather as roles to inhabit and strictly follow - and never go above and beyond.

This often led to hilarious and infuriatingly inefficient results, and me and my family constantly marvelled at this, even after ten years in such an environment. Some examples:

In construction, the boss would have to be on-site at all times. He'd just be standing there watching his workers work, because if he left, they would immediately slack off. And if he gave instructions, they would follow these instructions to the letter, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When asked why they did something particularly stupid, they'd shrug and explain that they were told to do this and so they just did it. It often had little to do with their abilities.

When an individual worker would be promoted to a managerial position, he or she, no matter their personality, would instantly turn into a rather unpleasant bossy character, and not take any initiatives beyond 'managing'. Working alongside their underlings was unacceptable. Seeing this sudden transformation was a bit scary.

A translator working for my father wasn't very familiar with computers but when tasked to translate some text using word perfect, she went ahead and started working hard. A few hours in, he checked up on her and while she said everything was fine, he noticed that she hadn't translated more than a page. After some prodding, she explained that she was rather frustrated that as she reached the end of the page, her earlier translations vanished. It turned out that she had translated a screen full of text multiple times and simply didn't understand that off-screen text was still there. At no point did she feel an urge to ask about this, despite her frustration.

I could keep going, but what really struck me, again and again, was the sense of lemming-like behavior that people exhibited as soon as they were assigned a role, the huge inefficiencies of having multiple people do very specific jobs that one person could do faster and better in the same amount of time, and the complete lack of a sense of 'professional pride' in their roles.

What was especially interesting about all this is that my 'home' culture (Holland) is pretty much on the extreme other end of the scale (often, not always): bosses dress down and tried to avoid any kind of pulling rank (to a fault sometimes), employees have opinions on everything, even things outside their responsibility, and they express these opinions vocally and often with little regard of rank and appropriateness. Flat power structures (polder model) are favored over big hierarchies.

When children in this developing nation talked back to their parents, they'd receive punishment whether they were correct or not. When Dutch kids talk back we consider them cute and precocious.

These are broad strokes, of course, but these differences were apparent time and time again.

I have some theories as to why this is the case, but none that seem to fully explain these massive differences.