Why do they need to know?

It has been about 1 1/2 year since I started working in Korea. I still find it difficult to convince my colleagues that "sharing" is important. That is, it is crucial that the team members talk about what is going on with whatever they are doing.

While we have many meetings, it is not unusual to see most of the participants (it is almost an inappropriate choice of vocabulary since the majority of them do not even say anything) keep their mouth shut and only respond to questions directly addressed to them. If you ask how things are going, the usual response is "there is no issue." Why is it so difficult to hear something like "I was working on trying to fix an issue we found a week ago and we tried method a, b, c, and d and d seems to be the promising solution??"

Another thing mind-boggling is the attitude "why do they need to know?" A lot of people here still believe that the top-down command chain works better than collaboration based on horizontal communication. However, many veterans in software engineering have more than enough to say the top-down command is just disastrous for work that involve creativity. Is this ever going to get better?