‘Korean corporate executive rooms are like funeral homes’

One executive at a large corporation in Korea has the trauma from being verbally abused by a senior executive several years ago when he was a general manager. When he expressed a different opinion from the executive’s suggestion, his boss yelled at him with curse words, saying that the most important thing in surviving in an organization was not to upset one’s boss and telling him not to even dream about getting promoted to an executive position without knowing the “principle.” He said he felt so shocked and insulted that he could not focus on his work for several days.

An executive post is a much coveted position for the high salaries and social status but entails a lot of stresses. Some corporate executives complain that their jobs are only as secure as those of temporary employees. Many executives have the competence and moral influence befitting their positions. However, there are also many others who have anger management issues, treating their subordinates like pawns on the chess board as their psychological stresses combine with their superior statuses. Books on U.S. and Japanese entrepreneurs and financiers also depict such types of executives. However, it seems that such corporate climate is more evident in Korea.

The Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCCI) surveyed some 40,000 executives and employees at Korea’s top 100 companies by using global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company’s Organizational Health Index. According to the result, 77 percent of the companies showed lower degrees of organizational health than the average of global corporations. One non-Korean man who once served as an executive at a Korean company said, “Executive offices at Korean companies are like a solemn funeral home. Seeing employees standing upright before an executive and simply nods at the boss’s unreasonable orders without being able to ask why or say no, I thought it was not going to get improved easily.

It is not possible to run a profit-oriented company such as a social club. However, such backward corporate culture as top-down orders, inefficient meetings and insults or verbal abuses of subordinates would stifle creativity and innovation, becoming a stumbling block in a company’s long-term growth. Park Yong-man, chairman of the KCCI, expressed concerns over such corporate culture. “Without upgrading feature phone-grade corporate management software to latest smartphone-grade software, it would be hard to overcome the low-growth and the new normal,” he said. Chief executives should pay attention to such an issue so that healthy corporate culture will take root.

권순활논설위원 shkwon@donga.com