Someone I know works with one of the world’s largest technology and consulting firms. Based in India, mid-level, close to eight years with the same organisation. For most of that time, this person worked directly with the global team.
Global colleagues were respectful. They valued your time. Feedback started with what was working before moving to what needed improving. Meetings happened at odd hours because of time zones, and that was genuinely inconvenient. But the work itself was calm. Professional. Dignified.
Not particularly warm. Nobody was pretending to be a friend. But there was a quality that should be unremarkable and somehow wasn’t: people knew where to draw the line.
Then came an internal realignment. Same company. Different team. Indian colleagues, Indian bosses.
The shift was not gradual.
Screaming. Shouting. Sunday calls with no notice. Everything marked urgent, regardless of whether it was. And underneath all of it, a persistent effort to make this person feel inadequate. Twenty-five years of experience, and still the message coming from every direction: you don’t know enough, you haven’t done enough, you are not enough.
Same organisation. Same designation. Completely different experience of what it means to go to work.
What changed, and what didn’t
The technology didn’t change. The clients didn’t change. The work itself didn’t change in any fundamental way.
What changed was the cultural operating system running underneath the work.
This is not an isolated story. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that 86 per cent of Indian employees surveyed described themselves as struggling at work. That is not a rounding error. It is a signal.
The question worth sitting with is not whether Indian workplaces can be difficult. That much is no longer seriously in dispute. The question is why. And whether the people reproducing these patterns have ever stopped to examine where they came from.
“What changed was the cultural operating system running underneath the work.”
The scarcity that became a mindset
India’s corporate workforce, particularly the generation now in middle and senior management, grew up in conditions of genuine professional scarcity. Competition for jobs was brutal. Proving yourself was not a corporate aspiration. It was a survival requirement.
That anxiety produced capable, driven professionals. It also produced a management culture that never fully let go of the pressure it was formed under.
The person who was once desperate to prove themselves often becomes the manager who expects everyone around them to prove themselves too. Not because the scarcity is still there in the same form, but because the psychological template was set during years when it was.
The cycle became self-reinforcing. At some point, Indian professionals began staying late and responding to emails on weekends not because it was demanded, but because it created visible differentiation. The expectation built from there. Now the person who leaves on time or ignores a Sunday message is quietly marked as insufficiently serious.
Breaking the cycle carries individual career risk. So very few people challenge it.
The result is a workplace where demonstrating competence is never quite finished. Where urgency is performed almost as often as it is real. Where making a colleague feel small can, unconsciously, feel like making oneself feel larger.
The hierarchy that never got questioned
Indian social structures have always placed enormous weight on seniority. Questioning a senior is not simply a professional act. It carries cultural freight that makes it feel like a violation of something more fundamental.
This translated directly into management behaviour. The boss’s authority in many Indian workplaces is not just organisational. It is personal. Disagreement registers as disrespect.
The behaviour sometimes crosses from demanding into theatrical.
One manager at the Indian centre of a large technology firm reportedly took pride in patrolling the office canteen during work hours. If a team member’s cup was empty, they were sent back to their desk. This manager boasted about it in team meetings. Not as an admission of something embarrassing. As evidence of good management.
This is not anecdotal imagination. A discussion thread on Reddit’s Bangalore community, where hundreds of professionals shared experiences of working in Indian offices of global firms, revealed remarkably similar patterns. Managers taking pride in restrictive cultures. Teams working late not because the work demanded it, but because visibility demanded it.
Different companies. Different industries. The same story.
The new generation has largely rejected this framing. Gen Z and younger millennials are far more willing to push back and call out behaviour their parents’ generation absorbed silently. But many of the managers above them were formed in a different school, trained through authority structures that rewarded compliance and deference.
Some chose to do things differently. Others reproduced the template without ever examining it.
That gap is where much of the current friction in Indian workplaces lives.
The colonial residue
It would be too simple to trace everything back to colonial history. But it would also be dishonest to pretend it left no mark.
The administrative structures India inherited from British rule were built on compliance, not collaboration. Authority was absolute. The hierarchy existed to be obeyed, not engaged with.
Independent India built its own institutions, but the management DNA inside many of them carried forward patterns that were never consciously dismantled. The deference to rank. The instinct to protect positional authority rather than share it. These did not disappear with independence. They migrated into corporate life.
Most of India’s younger workforce has moved beyond this mindset. The traces remain most visible among those trained by people who were themselves trained by people who never questioned the original template.
Three generations removed, but not yet gone.
The global team’s other face
It would be a mistake to conclude that global teams are simply better.
They are, in many cases, more professional. The respect for boundaries is real. The structured feedback culture is real.
But the most revealing data point in this conversation is not about western companies at all. It is about Indian ones.
Indian MNCs operating overseas routinely offer their foreign employees flexible hours, remote work, and generous leave. The Indian colleagues working on the same projects from Bengaluru or Hyderabad sit late, take calls well into the evening, and often earn a fraction of the salary.
The problem is not that western companies treat Indian branches differently.
“The variable is not the company. It is the location, and the management culture that location has produced.”
Indian companies often treat their own Indian employees differently from their overseas staff.
The variable is not the company. It is the location, and the management culture that location has produced.
The same manager who is collaborative and measured with colleagues in London can become authoritarian with a team in Bengaluru. That suggests the issue is not capability. It is permission.
That is what makes the contrast difficult to dismiss. The same organisation is capable of creating radically different employee experiences depending on which cultural norms dominate the workplace.
And when an Indian professional on a global team competes with a counterpart in the US or Europe for a managerial role, the outcome is, far more often than it should be, in favour of the person closer to headquarters.
India is valued for execution. For delivering complex work reliably and at scale.
Leadership is often a different conversation.
Yes, Indian-origin CEOs run some of the world’s most consequential companies. Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella. Indra Nooyi. The list is real and impressive.
But these are exceptional people in exceptional circumstances, not evidence that the system works equitably for the average Indian professional in a regional office in Bengaluru or Pune.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
For every Indian-origin Fortune 500 CEO, there are thousands of Indian professionals who watched a less experienced colleague in the US or Europe get the managerial promotion they were passed over for. Quietly. With no explanation that could be directly challenged.
The glass ceiling for Indian talent inside global organisations is rarely made of prejudice that announces itself. It is made of assumptions: that leadership presence means a certain kind of cultural fluency, that executive gravitas sounds a certain way, that the right person for the room is the one senior leadership in New York or London can most easily picture being there.
Those assumptions are rarely examined. Rarely even named.
That is what makes them durable.
“Resilience becomes the system’s best defence against reform.”
The question that doesn’t get asked
Indian corporate culture has produced extraordinary professionals. People who navigate complexity, absorb pressure, and deliver under constraints that would defeat less resilient people.
That resilience is real. The problem is that when resilience becomes the only acceptable response to a broken system, it stops being a strength and starts becoming a mechanism that allows the system to sustain itself.
If people absorb the shouting, the Sunday calls, the public humiliation, and the constant undermining because they are resilient enough to survive it, the workplace never has to change. The behaviour continues because the people experiencing it continue to function.
Resilience becomes the system’s best defence against reform.
The person who shared this story with me is still with the same organisation. Still doing good work. Still navigating the new environment. But something has changed.
The clarity with which they described the difference between the two cultures, what it felt like to be respected versus what it felt like to be managed through fear, does not come from nowhere. It comes from having experienced both and recognising that the two approaches produce very different outcomes.
One culture expected performance and accountability while preserving dignity. The other relied on pressure, urgency, and hierarchy to achieve compliance. Both delivered work. Only one made people better at their jobs.
That distinction matters because Indian workplaces have become exceptionally good at producing resilient employees. The question is whether resilience is the outcome we should be celebrating.
We already know how to make people harder. The question we keep avoiding is whether the cultures we have built are helping people become better professionals, or simply teaching them to endure more.