I am giving the datapoint, from the US, that I found team-mates, subordinates and managers to all respond defensively when asked a simple straightforward "why".
I never found my co-workers to be defensive when I asked them the same question in Japan (in Japanese). I didn't have any subordinates, and management let the group decide, (at our level), so challenging management rarely came up.
I agree that asking "why" is probably not a career-ending move in the US -- I'm just talking about the subtle first-response I've notices from other Americans in the first place. I don't know that it has any larger relevance than to maybe lend support to the idea that US workers (or engineers, anyway) are afraid to be wrong in public too.
Thanks for the perspective -- I would have guessed exactly the opposite, using the logic that many Asian societies have highly formal and even ritualized notions of hierarchy and authority, and that asking "why" in such a place could be tantamount to questioning that authority. But maybe it's different when everyone is at the same spot in the hierarchy.
Don't get me wrong. The consensus attainment rituals/processes I found there (Japan, mid-80s~mid-90s) were mind-numbingly slow/tedious/inefficient.
But, in companies that manufactured products intended to compete in the global marketplace (and not something intended to meet some local need), the internal processes for doing root-cause analysis of design, manufacturing or even business model defects was pretty direct/efficient/ruthless and impersonal. To me that makes some sense: If I were on a team of 100 NASA engineers, all of us armed with slide-rules, trying to send some people to the moon and back, I wouldn't want feelings (or social standing) to get in the way of the process of verifying that the calculations were correct.
I never found my co-workers to be defensive when I asked them the same question in Japan (in Japanese). I didn't have any subordinates, and management let the group decide, (at our level), so challenging management rarely came up.
I agree that asking "why" is probably not a career-ending move in the US -- I'm just talking about the subtle first-response I've notices from other Americans in the first place. I don't know that it has any larger relevance than to maybe lend support to the idea that US workers (or engineers, anyway) are afraid to be wrong in public too.