Cultural Differences in Job Motivation

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Miscellaneous grade: Distinction The University of Surrey (Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences) course: Intercultural Communication with International Business language: English abstract: What makes people get up in the morning - is it the simple habit the routine or the sense of purpose? Why do people make promises to do and decide certain things? Some people get more done than others (Riley:1996 p.44); while some drift along others are goal-setters; and some just cannot get started whereas others are unstoppable. Why is it so? Why do employees ask themselves if it is worth the reward to make an effort to achieve a goal (Van der Wagen Davies:1998 p.24)? The answer can be found in the realm of motivation. Motivation something that according to various book titles1 needs to be understood belongs to leadership studies and organisational behaviour. Consequently looking at what motivates people and to lead them is essential for every manager (ibid.) because different things might motivate different staff members. One would not expect people to be as complex as they are but culture although not the only variable of importance contributes significantly to explain key differences in social behaviour (Treven Mulej Lynn:2008 p.33). Factors motivating followers in organisations often differ from culture to culture and do not only diverge from different organisational cultures (ibid.: p.34). There is no proof that motives like need for achievement intrinsic needs for competence and self-efficacy can be generalised across cultures as the specific factors which drive such motives vary across cultures (Gelfand Erez Aycan:2007 p.482). This leads to the area of cross-cultural organisational behaviour which as well as culture-specific work motivation only have a relatively short research history but they actually date back to the times of Dionysios I. from Syrakus2