Why Too Much Respect in the Cockpit Can Kill You

Photo by Marina Avila

A significant cultural difference between the U.S. and Mexico is the formality with which people address their superiors. In the U.S., the common practice is to call your boss by his or her first name. But professional relationships in Mexico are more hierarchical.

One way this manifests itself in Mexico is through the use of titles.  In a recent blog post, Jeremy Schwartz–a reporter with the Austin-based newspaper The Statesman–says that many times when he calls someone in Mexico for a story a simple “Senor” or “Senora” won’t do. When addressing an engineer, you must refer to them as “Engineer”  or “Engeniero” so and so. Someone who has graduated from college without a specialized degree must be called “Licenciado“, which means “licensed one.”

In contrast, in countries such as the United States professionals have flatter hierarchical relationships. On the surface, at least, most professionals try to convey a sense of equality in the workplace.

While this might seem like no more than an interesting cultural difference between the U.S. and Mexico, it can have deadly implications.

In his top-selling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explores an unfortunate side effect of highly hierarchical cultures in a chapter called “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes.” Besides equipment malfunctions, another cause of plane crashes is faulty human interactions in the cockpit, Gladwell says. Sometimes miscommunications are attributable to the pilot’s ethnic background, according to Gladwell.

He describes one plane crash that resulted because the airplane’s Colombian co-pilot was not assertive enough in telling the control tower that his plane was dangerously low on gas and needed to land immediately.

The problem, according to the experts cited in the book, is attributable to the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). “Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority,” one of the experts explains. In the cockpit, PDI can play a critical role. A co-pilot from a high PDI country is less likely to call out a captain’s error or ask him to reconsider a faulty decision.

Gladwell says if you compare a list of the countries with the highest PDIs, they match up very closely with plane crashes by country.

The top five pilot PDIs by country are:

• Brazil,
• South Korea,
• Morroco,
• Mexcio,
• Phillipines

The five lowest are:

• United States,
• Ireland,
• South Africa,
• Australia,
• New Zealand.