Well, I can tell you from decades of personal professional experience as a portuguese who also spent most of his career working in other countries in Europe that the portuguese management culture is complete total crap. Similarly the business environments is very bad, with a few politically connected giants exploiting cartel or near monopoly positions acquired through such connections (for example, mobile networks in Portugal are more expensives than in Germany whilst salaries are between half and 1/3) and in effect acting as a anchor on the neck of the whole Economy, both people and companies.

Personally I think it’s because of the complete total dominance of cronyism and nepotism in the selection of people for pretty much any well paid positions as well as for things as simple as getting licenses from city halls for business operations (were you also get lots of corruption) - certainly the so-called “cunha” (getting a job through connections) is the main path to management positions in Portugal.

Last but not least, in general the style of working in Portugal is very very low on preparation, analysis, quality measurement of outcomes and in general any kind of well organised approach to working processes, so unsurprisingly the greatest strength of he portuguese workforce is the “desenrascanço” (which roughly means “last minute improvisation as a ‘method’ of doing things”). This would be ok if it was mainly the non-managerial professionals doing, but given the above mentioned selection “methodology” for management, the very people who are supposed to amongst other things organise work activities and environments “work” like that hence are very very bad at methodical, prepared, process-based work planning (lets just say that what in other countries are “known unknowns”, in Portugal are “unknown unknowns” and even some “known knows” elsewhere are “unknow unknowns” in the typical portuguese project, so extreme is the tendency to “dive in and figure things out when we get there”).

(Mind you, portuguese workers can learn to be organised and thorough whilst keeping their advantages as “highly-trained” improvisationalists, but if you’re in an environment were “everybody works like this”, that’s not going to happen, especially because things like preparation, analysis and setting up of quality metrics do not look like “doing work” to their managers, who will push them into activities with immediate visible outputs as that’s what looks like “work” to them.

All in all the country is not meritocratic (quite the opposite), is chained down by the incestuous relationship between politics and a few giant companies and thus pulled down by the dominance of rent extraction in the Economy and the dominant work culture (by a large margin) is improvisationalism.

Unsurprisingly the strongest growth sector in Portugal is one which bypasses most of this or suffers the least when it happens: “Selling the Sunshine”, a.k.a. Tourism.

PS: Mind you, in a big Historical prespective I would say that it’s still the Post-imperial period, as that seems to last centuries: just look at places which were long ago the center of grand empires - Greecy, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and so on - or look at the decay of Britain (the previous great imperial powerer) now and over the last 5 decades. I suspect there’s some kind of society-wide shift from a Doer mindset to a Taker mindset that isn’t easilly undone - certainly Portugal has at all levels a very entrenched mindset of “You’re a sucker if you don’t take advantage of the ‘System’ whenever you can get away with it” though fortunatelly and unlike certain countries, it’s not at all like that an interpersonal level.