This phenomenon appears in more than one culture, and I think in just about every culture it is damaging to conducting effective business, but not _extremely_.<p>Only companies big enough to endure this kind of damage (or smart enough to make sure it doesn&#x27;t happen) are the ones that make it. If you&#x27;re running a startup with 3-5 people, and someone is wrong about something, chances are the stakes are much much larger than a 100 person company. As such, you can&#x27;t afford to have this kind of culture at startup scale, but you can, at large scale, because everyone gets more chances to be wrong (and have the company stay afloat). Then you start thinking about 1,000+, 10,000+, 100,000+ people companies and you can imagine how many small inefficiencies&#x2F;mistakes like this companies can withstand.<p>Depending on where you work in the US, there are still managers&#x2F;bosses that don&#x27;t like to be contradicted, because of some perception of loss of authority&#x2F;power&#x2F;credibility&#x2F;etc (and most likely some personal insecurity).