Rahmat Wibowo recounted being wrongfully terminated twice by AWS and Liven, accusing foreign managers and HR structures of enacting 'crab mentality' to suppress rising Indonesian professionals, framing his ordeal as systemic sabotage disguised as compliant HR processes.

Bucket The Crab Bucket -: Has No Borders Story Of HRBP Dinda Rhapsodya and Dian Hamama Crab Mentality, Indonesian Workplaces, and the Hidden Cost of Pulling Others Down “If | cannot have it, neither can you." The most destructive sentence in the Indonesian professional vocabulary is never spoken aloud. It is simply enacted, one blocked career at a time." A Personal Note Before We Begin | was wrongfully terminated. Twice. Once from a globally recognized cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) . Once from a tech company Liven with an HRBP structure that was supposed to protect people like me. In both cases, my direct manager was a foreigner, someone who had no cultural, social, or personal relationship with me beyond what the employment contract required. There were no shared meals. No mutual networks. No informal loyalty. Only the professional relationship as defined by law. And yet the decisions made against me bore every hallmark of what organizational psychologists and communication researchers now formally call "crab mentality." Not because | performed poorly. Not because | violated policy. But because | was visible. Because | was growing. Because someone, somewhere, decided that a rising Indonesian professional was a threat rather than an asset. I share this not for sympathy. | share this because my story is not unique. It is systemic. And if you are a professional in Indonesia, there is a real probability that you have either experienced this, witnessed it, or, without knowing it, participated in it yourself. This article is a deep dive into what crab mentality is, why it is especially pronounced in Indonesian professional culture, how it manifests in the workplace including through management structures and HR functions, and what we, individually and collectively, can do about it. What Is Crab Mentality? Defining the Phenomenon The term "crab mentality" is drawn from an observable natural behavior: when multiple crabs are placed in an open bucket, none of them escape, because every time one crab begins to climb toward freedom, the others pull it back down. No lid is needed. The crabs themselves become the mechanism of collective imprisonment. As a metaphor for human behavior, crab mentality describes the tendency of individuals within a group to undermine, obstruct, or sabotage the progress of a peer who is succeeding or attempting to succeed. The underlying logic is captured in a single destructive phrase: "If | cannot have it, neither can you." Grab mentality is not a defect of the poor or uneducated. It thrives in corporate boardrooms. It thrives in ‘multinational HR departments. It thrives wherever insecurity meets proximity to someone else's success. Psychologically, crab mentality is fueled by a powerful psychological barrier: limiting beliefs. The most common is a false belief in scarcity, or what psychologists call zero-sum thinking, the incorrect belief that one person's success must come at the expense of others. This cognitive distortion transforms colleagues into rivals and organizational peers into existential threats. eon fsungers groundrean Socal Gpurson Ter. sree 8 4, eins ch he pachloy 2 any. According tot toy me Meta-analytic reviews of envy link heightened malicious responses to perceived inequities more strongly in resource-constrained environments, where individuals exhibit elevated rates of schadenfreude and sabotage toward outperformers. However, the phenomenon persists universally, with evolutionary psychology attributing it to adaptive mechanisms for social leveling that operate irrespective of class, as high socioeconomic groups display similar patterns in competitive hierarchies. 3 0.62 314 The Indonesian Context: Why "Mental Kepiting" Is More Than a Phrase In Indonesia, crab mentality is colloquially known as "mental kepiting." The phrase is so embedded in everyday professional discourse that it has entered the vocabulary of journalists, HR practitioners, management consultants, and university researchers alike. The answer to why it is so prevalent lies at the intersection of cultural history, economic structure, and organizational dynamics specific to the Indonesian context. 2.1 Collective Culture and the Pressure of Social Leveling Indonesia is, at its core, a collectivist society. The values of gotong royong (mutual cooperation) and rukun (social harmony) are deeply embedded in the national ethos. These values, when functioning healthily, produce remarkable solidarity and community resilience. But when they are distorted by insecurity, they produce their dark mirror: the compulsion to ensure that no individual rises too visibly above the group. Social leveling is a well-documented phenomenon in collectivist cultures. The logic is implicit but powerful: your extraordinary success is a social disruption. It creates distance between you and your peers. It challenges the shared narrative that "we are all the same." And in environments where collective identity is paramount, the individual who breaks rank is often seen not as an inspiration but as a betrayal. This does not mean Indonesian culture is inherently sabotage-prone. It means that without intentional structural safeguards, the collectivist impulse can be weaponized by insecure actors who dress up their envy as concern for group cohesion. 2.2. The Scarcity Economy and the Competition for Limited Opportunity Crab mentality often emerges in communities or environments where opportunities feel limited. It is rooted in insecurity, fear, and scarcity thinking. Indonesia, despite its remarkable economic growth over the past two decades, remains a country where high- quality professional opportunities are concentrated in a relatively small number of companies and cities. Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya absorb a disproportionate share of the formal economy. The top tier of corporate employment, especially in multinational technology companies, consulting firms, and financial institutions, represents a narrow gateway through which millions of qualified candidates compete. This structural scarcity is not imagined. It is real. And it creates conditions where the advancement of one peer genuinely can feel like the closing of a door for another. When the bucket is small and the opportunities few, the crab instinct intensifies. 2.3: Research Evidence: Bandung and Papua Studies Sct epoca nich cyan cig tes Socal Fae ing with eeprom nora and renin ad comp is Isolation. Mistrust. Alienation. These are not abstract organizational outcomes. These are the lived experiences of talented Indonesians who dared to develop themselves and were punished for it. How Crab Mentality Operates in the Corporate Workplace Understanding the theoretical foundations of crab mentality is one thing. Recognizing how it actually operates inside organizations, including sophisticated multinational corporations, is another. In the workplace, crab mentality exists as a toxic behavior pattern driven by envy, insecurity, and a scarcity mindset. It fosters an "Us vs. Them" mentality where peers are viewed as rivals rather than collaborators, creating division and distrust. Research found that workplace envy was strongly linked to social undermining, behaviors intended to hinder another's success or well-being. These subtle actions silently destroy collaboration. The behavioral signatures of crab mentality in a corporate context include the following: erformance Nara Disrton The Foreign Manager Dimension: Power Without Cultural Accountability This dimension of crab mentality is rarely discussed openly, yet it is among the most consequential in the Indonesian multinational corporate context. When an Indonesian employee reports to a foreign manager, the normal social accountability structures that might restrain crab mentality behavior are largely absent. A foreign manager typically has no shared community ties with the Indonesian subordinate. They are not part of the same alumni network, neighborhood, or religious community. They will not encounter the terminated employee at a family gathering or neighborhood mosque. The social cost of wrongful conduct is effectively zero. The dynamic is not necessarily one of deliberate racial or ethnic discrimination. More often, it is a structural alignment problem: a foreign manager, themselves facing performance pressure, perceives a high-performing local employee as a complexity they cannot fully manage or control. The result is a form of workplace crab mentality that is institutionally laundered through formal HR processes, producing a termination that looks procedurally correct from a compliance perspective but is fundamentally an act of suppression. | pursued legal remedies. | documented everything. | filed reports. Because when the crab bucket uses corporate paperwork as its walls, the only way out is through the legal system and through the court of public record. The Organizational Cost of Crab Mentality Crab mentality is not simply a personal injustice. It is a strategic liability for organizations. Stifled Reduced Burned For organizations operating in Indonesia specifically, the cost extends further. When talented local professionals are suppressed, their knowledge, networks, and contextual understanding, all of which are critical competitive advantages in a complex market like Indonesia, are lost to the organization. The company does not just lose a person. It loses the irreplaceable social capital that person carried. Indonesia's digital and technology sectors are growing rapidly. The demand for skilled, bilingual, technically sophisticated professionals with deep local market understanding far outstrips the supply. Organizations that allow crab mentality to govern their talent management decisions are burning a scarce and irreplaceable resource. What Must Change: Individual, Organizational, and Systemic 6.1 Individual Level: Self-Awareness and the Abundance Shift The first obligation belongs to each of us. Shifting from scarcity to abundance thinking is crucial for overcoming crab mentality. Mindfulness practices and regular self-reflection can help identify these patterns before they become destructive behaviors. Ask yourself: When a colleague succeeds, is your first emotion pride or threat? When someone in your professional circle advances faster, do you wonder what you can learn from them, or do you look for reasons why they did not deserve it? These are not comfortable questions. But they are honest ones. And the willingness to ask them honestly is the beginning of escaping the bucket. 6.2 Organizational Level: Structural Safeguards Against Capture Organizations operating in Indonesia need to implement specific structural safeguards: ude RRP Acoust 6.3. Systemic Level: Legal Enforcement and Public Accountability Indonesian labor law is actually well- constructed. The problem is not the law. The problem is enforcement and awareness. Many Indonesian employees do not know their rights under Law No. 13 of 2003, as amended by the Job Creation Law, or under Government Regulation No. 35 of 2021. Many do not know that discrimination-based terminations are explicitly prohibited and legally challengeable. Public documentation matters too. Sharing experiences, naming patterns, and building a body of professional public recordted to about these dynamics is not grievance theater. It is a form of systemic accountability that complements formal legal remedies. Dedicated to : Dinda Auchterin Rhapsodya (Dinda Rhapsodya) from Liven sty term Dinda Hamama from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Rahmatan lil alamin erie this artile as someone cho climbed out ofthe bucket. Not eleanty or without cost. But Iam out ‘he philsopy that guides my life and my work is am orientation toward the cori that begins with the belie that genuine sucess s no competitie in the zero-sum sense. That my grth does not diminish yours. that arising tide, area one built on competence and integrity, its every boa ‘The cra bucket operates onthe opposite bei tha the bucket is all, ‘here is, ana that keeping others in itis the same as being safe Ifyou are a profesional ho hasbeen suppressed, terminated unfair, blocked by a system that should hace protected you, kno ‘hat the las has provisions for you, that documentation is your armor, and that public narrative ia legitimate tot of accountability ‘Tsou are ina position of organizational power, hetheras an LHRBP, a manager, or an executive, understand that rab mentality doesnot annownceiself as cruelty. I announces itself as process compliance, It arrives dressed in performance management language ‘and HR polis. Your jb isto look past the form and assess the substance. ‘The bucket is real. But it is not permanent. References 1. Purwaningwulan, M. M., and Ghina Khaira. (2025). "The Phenomenon of Crab Mentality Among Employees in Bandung City in Self-Development Process." Jurnal Komunikasi Ikatan Sarjana Komunikasi Indonesia, 10(1), 50- 61 jurnal-iski.or.id i . Suteki, M., et al. (2024). "Crab Mentality in Higher Education: A Phenomenological Exploration of Its Implications for Human Resource Development." Dinasti International Journal of Education Management and Social Science.dinastipub.org oe Mattone, J. (2025). "How Leaders Can Cope with Crab Mentality in the Workplace." John Mattone Global.johnmattone.com - A Place of Hope. (2026). "Crab Mentality: Breaking Free from the Psychology of Pulling Others Down.aplaceofhope.com - Festinger, L. (1954). "A Theory of Social Comparison Processes."Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140. Cad Grokipedia. (2026). "Crab Mentality." grokipedia.com N -ICLG. (2026). "Employment and Labour Laws and Regulations Report 2026: ad Indonesia Incorp. (2025). "Minimizing Legal Disputes in Employee Termination."indonesia.incorp.asia © Cekindo. (2025). "Legal Framework for Employee Termination in 10. Lexology. (2024). "At a Glance: Termination of Employment in Indonesia."lexology.com . Republic of Indonesia. Law No. 13 of 2003 on Manpower (Undang-Undang Ketenagakerjaan), as amended by Law No. 6 of 2023 (Job Creation Law / Omnibus Law). 12. Republic of Indonesia. Government Regulation No. 35 of 2021 on Fixed- Term Employment Agreements, Outsourcing, Working Hours and Rest Hours, and Termination of Employment. (ew GB InfraLoka Nerd... + Subscribe 759 followers 61