> We are a bit anti-authority, I think it is hard to deny this trait. We don't like being bossed around but that's not systematic or unavoidable: we just want to follow orders we respect. So in France, you almost never give orders to someone without explaining the why (and complain about the clueless boss/client that made this order a necessity). Give us a good reason, the first answer will be yes.
This is interesting. I'm Swedish, and in a previous job I had a series of meetings with a French hardware design team. We were taught internally before the meeting, and it seemed to be confirmed during the meeting, that the French would be much more hierarchical than what we were used to, and that the French designers wouldn't contradict their manager in the meeting. If the manager said something, the designers would defend it, even if incorrect.
Contrast that with the typically flat organizations of a Swedish company, and where a designer would be expected to correct a manager in a meeting if they said something incorrect, otherwise you're letting the manager down. If you know that something can't be done, for example, and have more information than the manager, you're expected to say something. All of my managers would have been upset if I let them look like a fool in a meeting by making decisions with incomplete information, if I knew something that could help them. Both of us would lose status by me not saying anything, rather than both losing status by me piping up during the meeting.
That's not to say that the Swedish culture is perfect! A lot of people I've worked with from abroad are annoyed by the consensus culture that everyone here has to agree on everything. That can mean long times where no one seems to make a decision, and a decision can be revisited and flipped because someone later disagrees. I can see how it can be frustrating to never know for sure if something is decided or not, and that it can feel like managers don't take their responsibility if they want the whole group to make most decisions together. Or, the decision can be unclear to someone from a different culture, because the Swedish manager thought that the group reached consensus without the actual decision having to be spelled out.