How a Country’s Culture Affects Motivational Efforts

Competing in global markets entail many factors and centralization of its human resource practices is certainly vital to improve global competitiveness and empower employees for global assignments. To achieve success in global marketplace, the challenge of all businesses regardless of their size is to understand global corporate cultural differences and invest in human resources which includes selecting and retaining talented employee, training and development whilst encouraging employees to be innovative and creative. Employees selected to work in foreign locations should be prepared beforehand with adequate cross-cultural training. For an organization to be successful in the international marketplace, it must be concerned with this fit from both an internal and

Management, and the ability to lead and cultivate a team of individuals who strive to meet targets, work hard, and have loyalty to their company is an extremely difficult task by any standards. It requires a unique kind of person who is both demanding and rewarding, who can handle confrontation and who holds people to reasonable standards while encouraging teamwork and cooperation. This alone makes running a company, and finding upper and middle managers to facilitate plans and goals a worthy task, but with the advent of fast paced globalization, companies are now having to handle not only their internal management styles, but the management styles of a variety of different countries and cultures.

It is hypothesized that cultural differences in behaviour will mean differences in HRM practices within different cultures but those within the same cultural cluster will be similar whereas those in different clusters will be dissimilar. Employees and managers from different cultures take decisions in different ways – the processes, behaviours and values are not the same. People have different value orientations as a result of individual psychology, life-stage and generation and assumptions about behaviour determined by cultures are linked to a variety of organisational behaviours.

There are as many different methods of motivating employees today as there are companies operating in the global business environment. Still, some strategies are prevalent across all organizations striving to improve employee motivation. The best employee motivation efforts will focus on what the employees deem to be important. It may be that employees within the same department of the same organization will have different motivators. Many organizations today find that flexibility in job design and reward systems has resulted in employees ' increased longevity with the company, improved productivity, and better morale.

Have you ever thought why it’s good to help starving people in the world? No? Well, the first thing is.. Do you know how many people die of starvation each year? Well, at least 9 million people die of starvation each year worldwide. Also, at least 1 child dies of starvation each 10 seconds of your day. Wouldn't you want to save starving people in the world that need to be fed and cared?

Chapter I - Introduction 1.2 Problem statement and research questions “To what extent do motivational theories generalize across cultures, in explaining employees’ motivation?”

Kreitner, R. (2009). International Management and Cross-Cultural competence. (11th ed.). Management. Mason, Ohio: South-Western Cengage

As far as differences, both managers and leaders have to deal with different priorities and

Culture is shaped by beliefs, ideas, history, religion, and traditions that give each culture its distinctions. Leaders must take culture into account as they lead an organization. Eastern cultures place power and authority high creating a respectful gap between leadership and employees, while western cultures take a more democratic approach building relationship and influence with employees (Hamedoğlu, Kantor, and Gülay, 2012). Leaders must understand the culture surroundings and engage employees using those cultural values in conjunction with values of the organization. Values of an organization will often transcend over cultures, leaders must find a way to engage the values of the organization in a way that fits within the current culture (Staebler Tardino, 2012).

Over the last several years, the issue of employee motivation inside the workplace has been increasingly brought to the forefront. The reason why is because, globalization has been having an effect on the ability of firms to compete (which is placing more pressure on them). To deal with these challenges, most organizations are relying on their employees. The results are that those employers who are able to use this resource will be able to make adjustments quickly. This is when the firm will be able to maintain their dominance in the marketplace.

Cross cultural psychology and cultural psychology are two fields of psychology that are often confused. Cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology have many similarities and they differ in a few areas. Cross-cultural psychology is a comparative field of psychology that studies the cultural effects on human psychology. A cross-cultural study draws its conclusions from at least two samples of at least two different cultures and compares them in order to examine underlying reasons for diversity between the cultures, as well as the universals that each culture shares with another. Cultural psychology seeks to find the meaningful links between a culture and the psychology of the individuals living within that culture. Cultural psychology's main message is that human behavior is only meaningful when you're studying the behavior of individuals within the particular sociocultural, or in the culture in which the behavior occurs. The comparisons that cross-cultural psychology makes about each culture must begin with cultural studies.

Motivation in the workplace is one of the major concerns that managers face when trying to encourage their employees to work harder and do what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. According to Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn the definition of motivation is "the individual forces that account for the direction, level, and persistence of a person's effort expended at work." They go on to say that "motivation is a key concern in firms across the globe." Through the years there have been several theories as to what motivates employees to do their best at work. In order to better understand these theories we will apply them to a fictitious organization that has the following

When a company becomes international, it can be difficult for any corporation to design a rewards program that would attract new employees and give a reason to stay for existing employees. There are several factors that inspire employee motivation. These could be affected by culture, socio-economics, politics and environment.

The most recent studies in cross-cultural management reveal that the culture is a very expansive subject for organizations to study, especially for organizations, which hire the most diverse workforce. One definition of a diverse workforce could be as the one, which comes from different ethnic and demographic backgrounds (Plessis, 2011). For studying culture of the diverse workforce, there are two parts to study, the implicit and the explicit culture. The explicit culture includes behavior while the implicit part involves norms and values of individuals (Guang & Trotter, 2012). The explicit culture is already known when workers stay and work in a firm for a length of time, but the most difficult is to understand the implicit culture which is obscured in form of norms and values of the workers. Due to the differences of cultures, workers hold a great potential of variance, variety in terms of their explicit and implicit parts of the culture. The

However, the areas of leadership and management can also be considered to be very different.