The differences between the 'West' and the developing world are many, and the two can be divided along various lines. On the quantitative side there are vairables such as infant mortality or GDP per capita, while more theoretically one can speak of the core and periphery, or even yet divide the two geographically as The North and The South. Whatever your preferred descriptor and methodology, international aid organisations lie at a peculiar crossroads of the two worlds.
A typical international aid organisation has its headquarters in a glamorous city (Geneva, Brussels, New York), Western-country offices for coordinating bilateral aid and private donations (London, Ottawa, Washington), and in-country offices ("the field" -- Lilongwe, Dhaka, Delhi, etc) for implementing projects. The staff at the Western-country offices and the HQ are who you would expect: experienced aid professionals sporting post-graduate degrees from prestigious universities, uniformly residents of the West themselves. The working culture is one familiar to most residents of the West: deadlines, clear job descriptions, hierarchical management structure that provides direction and supervision, etc.
The in-country offices lie at the intersect between the West and developing countries. The offices are physically located in the developing world, but they are part of an international organisation's hierarchy that adheres to Western business practices. It is common in the industry to have Western citizens in senior positions (such as the country director), while the mid-level employees and below are residents of the country itself. The employees are the product of the host country's culture, language, social norms, and business practices, while the senior staff are from another culture entirely.
I'll preface this by saying that neither method of doing things is necessarily 'better'; both can probably accomplish organisational objectives equally well, minus the outlying cases of just outright poor management. However, at the in-country offices, the two ways of operating clash directly, as there is a disconnect between the objectives and procedures of the senior management (hailing from The West) and the lower level implementing staff (residents of the host country).
This disconnect can be bridged if it is acknowledged and mitigated. However, more often than not, it is ignored, allowing poor management practices to flourish. The senior management gets fed up with staff failing to meet deadlines and seemingly ignoring work directives. As they grow increasingly frustrated, they abandon their supervisory roles of ensuring tasks are being completed to standard along the way. Instead, they wait until the deadline arrives, and demand from the staff why the task hasn't been completed. When the task is completed, the supervisor may be surprised to discover it was not done to the standard or according to initial instructions, and then blame the staff; however, it is more likely a result of the supervisor failing in his duty to monitor the progress of his employees, since he found it too difficult to adapt.
Western aid workers should pay more attention to accomplishing their own job description -- providing effective management -- if they want tasks to be completed on time and to standard.
