When Cultures Collide in Crisis
MIT Sloan Management Review ·
Sergio Ingravalle/Ikon Images
High-stakes disruptions test businesses’ cultural agility as well as their operational resilience. As supply chains stretch across continents and leadership teams span time zones, cultural agility becomes a business essential. Many crises now unfold across cultures as much as they do across borders, but few executives are prepared for what happens when their best-laid response plans are lost in cultural translation. Even small differences in tone, timing, and language can determine whether leaders are seen as trustworthy or tone-deaf in the moments that matter most.
Subtle cultural divides can collapse into relational ruptures, even between neighbors and partners. In March 2026, an Air Canada aircraft collided with a fire vehicle on landing at New York’s LaGuardia airport. The two pilots died and many passengers were injured. In the immediate aftermath, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau issued a public message expressing condolences and outlining the airline’s response. He spoke completely in English, beyond saying “bonjour” and “merci” in opening and closing. His statement was clear, operationally appropriate, and accompanied by French subtitles.
Criticism centered not on the substance of Rousseau’s response but on its delivery. Air Canada is headquartered in Quebec, a bilingual province, where the French language carries particular cultural significance. For many of the Quebecois affected, including the family of one of the pilots, the CEO’s English address came across as disregard. Public criticism and scrutiny mounted rapidly, and within days, Rousseau announced his resignation from the airline.
This episode illustrates a recurring challenge in global crisis management — and, remarkably, closely mirrors an earlier incident. In 2013, a runaway train owned by a U.S.-based rail company exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, destroying the town and killing 47 people. Five days later, company chairman Edward Burkhardt arrived from Chicago and, like Rousseau, spoke only in English to a Quebecois community still in shock. What he viewed as a transparent defense of his company’s decisions was interpreted by the grieving community as arrogance and detachment. To them, leadership meant presence, compassion, humility, and acknowledgment of loss.
The wreckage of le train d’enfer — “the train from hell” — exposed how quickly a misreading of cultural and emotional contexts can derail a high-stakes situation. In cross-cultural contexts, effectiveness is determined not only by what is communicated but how it is conveyed. Effective leaders align their message with local expectations of empathy, respect, and shared identity. An impersonal response, such as substituting language-translation subtitles for direct engagement, can widen the gap between a leader’s intention and how that intent is perceived.
Major disruptions magnify hidden fractures, and cultural disconnects are among the deepest challenges that a company can face. In this article, we focus on organizational crises that cross national boundaries, such as transportation disasters, infrastructure failures, supply chain disruptions, safety incidents, and reputational emergencies affecting multinational businesses.
Decades of research have documented how deeply cultural norms shape organizational behavior. Around the world, we have seen well-prepared organizations experience stress or unravel because a response that worked in one country backfired in another. Most leaders underestimate the role that culture plays in a crisis in terms of who speaks up, who takes charge, and how quickly teams move when everything is on the line.
Crucially, the meaning of a crisis itself is culturally interpreted. What individual societies expect from leaders in moments of disruption — whether transparency, humility, decisiveness, or restraint — can vary widely. For global organizations, the future of crisis leadership belongs to those who can lead across cultural divides.
How, exactly, does culture interfere with crisis response? In our work with senior executives, three pressure points have shown up again and again.
In some national and professional cultures, direct communication is expected: Say it plainly, quickly, and publicly. Others prioritize nuance and saving face: Say it indirectly or behind closed doors. In a crisis, this behavioral gap can be deadly. One regional manager’s hesitation to escalate may look like complacency to headquarters, but the manager may be signaling danger as clearly as they know how.
Few examples illustrate this more starkly than the often-studied crash of Avianca Flight 052, a Colombian airliner that ran out of fuel while approaching New York’s Kennedy International Airport in 1990. As the aircraft circled in worsening weather, the crew repeatedly informed air traffic controllers that fuel was becoming critical. Yet they never used the explicit distress phrases “mayday,” “pan-pan,” or “emergency,” which would have triggered immediate priority handling by air traffic controllers.
The pilots’ training emphasized courtesy and deference to authority, consistent with both Colombian cultural norms and airline cockpit hierarchies. American air traffic controllers, operating within a highly procedural communication system, interpreted the pilots’ indirect message as a description of a manageable problem, not an urgent situation. Each side believed it was communicating clearly, but linguistic habits, professional training, and cultural expectations combined to obscure the danger.
The lesson for global leaders is sobering: When cultural assumptions shape how people signal urgency, misunderstanding itself becomes a systemic risk to manage.
Across cultures, expectations vary in how, or whether, people lower in an organizational hierarchy tend to question their superiors. In some environments, employees are generally comfortable challenging leaders or raising concerns directly. In others, hierarchy carries stronger expectations of deference, and speaking up without invitation can be seen as inappropriate. These differences become especially consequential during a crisis.
If authority is rarely challenged, critical information may never reach senior leaders, even when front-line employees see danger. The risk of critical information being softened, delayed, or discounted is amplified in global organizations due to differing cultural expectations about hierarchy. What appears to be alignment at the top may reflect hesitation or constraint further down. Silence from local teams does not necessarily signal a lack of awareness or agreement but deference and respect.
The cockpit transcripts from Avianca Flight 052 reveal the danger of this dynamic. Despite the flight engineer’s repeated warnings about dangerously low fuel levels, he was below the pilots in the cockpit hierarchy and thus expressed himself cautiously, without direct commands or clear escalation. In response, the pilots took no decisive action regarding his concerns.
Leaders must recognize when their own style suppresses input. Empowering local voices often requires deliberate outreach and clear decision protocols that make it safe to raise concerns. This is particularly important in more hierarchical cultures, where hesitation to question authority can slow a crisis response.
To some people, every minute counts in a crisis. To others, process matters more than speed, and relationships outrank deadlines. These mindsets can clash hard in emergency situations.
In 2020, a U.S.-based semiconductor company with a subsidiary in Taiwan wanted to shut down production plants and quickly liquidate inventory during a period of market instability. Although its Taiwanese partners perceived the decision as dangerously hasty, the company pursued selling off inventory for a multimillion-dollar write-off. The Americans moved fast to meet shifting market conditions. In contrast, the Taiwanese focused on slower-moving procedural discipline. The variation in timing eroded trust. This was not a failure of process but of pacing.
The lesson for crisis leaders is not to slow down or speed up but to explicitly surface the issue of tempo before a crisis forces it. How fast is fast enough? Who decides when urgency overrides consultation? These are both operational and cultural questions.
The most effective leaders prepare before the storm, listen through ambiguity, clarify decision-making authority, and restore confidence by communicating in culturally adept ways.
Don’t wait for a crisis to discover cultural blind spots. In a crisis, people trust who they know, and trust cannot be improvised. Assemble crisis response teams that combine global and local perspectives early. Cross-cultural teams that have practiced together develop a shared language and communication style. Test whether your crisis protocols actually work when deployed by teams with different cultural assumptions about authority, timing, and communication.
Crisis preparation can expose another, more fundamental challenge inside global organizations: Teams don’t always agree on what constitutes a serious risk — a reflection of different cultural attitudes toward uncertainty and preparedness.
For example, when the financial controller at the European headquarters of a global logistics company raised concerns with Lebanese colleagues about potential disruptions to airport operations, the Lebanese team was not overly concerned about the possibility. Nevertheless, the team members agreed to develop a worst-case plan to implement if the airport did indeed close. When the airport was later bombed, the company was able to rely on the alternate plan the team had developed.
When a crisis strikes, team members who have prepared and practiced together tend to move quickly. Established trust shortens response times and lowers defensiveness, the real currency of global agility.
Silence can carry a wealth of meanings. It may signal deference, disinterest, dissent, or deep concern. Silence often marks the moment before truth emerges, when leaders have to choose whether to fill the space or hold it.
Consider a European financial services group that was pursuing a complex joint venture in Asia in 2015. When colleagues from Italy joined the negotiations, they filled the room with direct argument while their Asian partners went quiet. Was their silence agreement, disagreement, or withdrawal? To get their crucial input, the global head of business development changed the setting, not the message, holding one-on-one meetings with his Asian colleagues without the Europeans present. He shrank the room to hear the words behind the silence.
Culturally fluent leaders treat silence as information. What is this pause, hesitation, or absence of response communicating? In some contexts, silence signals respect. In others, it reflects caution or concern about challenging authority. Interpreting silence requires patience, humility, and the recognition that communication is more than what is said aloud.
Effective leaders adjust accordingly. They create settings where candor is easier, through one-on-one briefings, back-channel check-ins, or small-group conversations. Using multiple communication channels can help critical information surface.
Before a crisis occurs, determine which decisions can and should be made locally or at headquarters, and by whom. Establish clear protocols that respect local cultural norms while maintaining necessary oversight. These actions can prevent dangerous delays, especially in moments when headquarters expects immediate action from local teams that are more accustomed to consensus-building.
Executives can be reluctant to delegate, even when a crisis unfolds far from view, but local judgment is essential for effective response closest to the action. Establishing rapid decision protocols, bringing cultural translators into crisis response teams, and creating negotiation channels can help prevent decisions from stalling. Defining decision authority in advance and determining what can be handled locally, what must be escalated to headquarters, and when exceptions are warranted can turn cultural diversity from a liability into a wealth of insight. When authority is distributed wisely to whoever is knowledgeable, global organizations gain speed and credibility.
Establishing local decision authority early proved invaluable for a U.S.-based global shipping organization during a complex cross-border construction project in Colombia that involved multiple regulatory environments. By anticipating delays that could have cost millions of dollars of profit daily, the CFO of global operations delegated technical, financial, and operational responsibility to specialists geographically closest to those issues rather than having every issue escalated to headquarters. “We have a philosophy to allocate risk to whoever is knowledgeable in these risks,” the CFO told us. This pre-negotiated decision authority allowed local experts to act quickly while global leadership maintained strategic oversight and organizational control.
Some headquarters attempt to micromanage all decisions, whereas others abdicate authority. Establishing a clear, culturally calibrated power structure well before a crisis emerges can facilitate highly effective responses.
Resolving common cross-cultural frictions requires more than the translation of words, and sending the same message across all regions does not guarantee understanding. In some cultures, messages must be clear, direct, and explicit, with little left to interpretation. In others, messages tend to be indirect, relying on what is already understood among people, with much of the meaning communicated through context. Relationships, points of shared understanding, tone of delivery, and situational context matter greatly.
The head of business development and strategy for a global insurance firm shared their experience with a breakdown of contract negotiations: “Europeans like to have big meetings and make all the decisions, while this is not necessarily the way to go when dealing with Asian counterparts.” Leaders who understand cultural nuances of relationship-building can build bridges by ensuring that they deliver their message in a culturally acceptable way — such as in a smaller, private setting — to preserve “face recovery.” A concept often misunderstood by Western counterparts, “face recovery” or “saving face” means protecting someone’s dignity and avoiding public embarrassment. In many Asian cultures, public critique or a blunt “no” can irrevocably damage a relationship, while in more Western contexts, directness and owning mistakes tend to signal honesty at the individual level and the very concept of “saving face” can sound evasive. What builds trust in one culture could erode it in another.
In cross-cultural crises, how leaders speak often determines whether they will be heard. Consider the full context of crisis communication, modifying not only the language but also the style, timing, and channels, to accommodate cultural expectations.
Fundamentally different assumptions about decisions made under pressure are signals of friction, not of failure. But cultural fluency cannot be improvised in the middle of an emergency. It must be developed in advance and tested through realistic simulations that expose teams to the kinds of cultural tensions they will face under pressure. Organizations that prepare well build cross-cultural and crisis management capabilities before an emergency occurs.
When cross-cultural obstacles arise, effective leaders pause to diagnose the source rather than forcing immediate alignment. Is the issue rooted in language, hierarchy, decision authority, or expectations about process? Something as simple as clarifying terminology may resolve the issue. In other cases, the friction may reveal deeper differences in how people define responsibility, expertise, or acceptable risk.
The key is to treat these obstacles as diagnostic opportunities. Rather than pushing past cultural differences, effective leaders consider them in refining the appropriate response. Leaders who scan quickly for the underlying cause by probing, clarifying, and gathering perspectives from local teams can surface information that would otherwise remain hidden.
Every leader eventually meets a moment that exposes the limits of their preparation. Global crisis leadership is less about command than connection: A successful crisis response aligns words, actions, and empathy. Culturally adept leaders translate norms and values as carefully as they translate language, which helps them earn trust in multiple dialects of accountability. Those who succeed know that strength is not the absence of vulnerability but the discipline of learning despite challenges. When cultures collide in crisis, leaders who prevail listen first, act with local clarity, and rebuild in ways that make their whole enterprise more resilient.