Is it a cultural thing?

I have written many times about work and culture, travelling around few countries, I thought I knew a lot about the world around me. Recently, we had a major management-employee conflict at the company I work with.

As a manager working with employees with various backgrounds, I tried my very best to reach to each of my employees through encouragement, communications and respect, but it seems like the more I try the less cooperation I got from some of my employees.

Now I started to feel like not every culture value hard and honest work the same, in some cultures you can not be straight forward with your employees, you must play tactful office politics in order to get things done.

Today, I really feel disappointed, I manage a group of people who happened to be far less educated and experienced and I have worked very hard with them to help them get advanced in their fields, but unfortunately, some of these employees thought of that as a weakness in my part because they came from a culture where managers usually don’t mingle with their employees.

So it is a cultural thing?