How Does Country Culture Affect Motivation Efforts

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3. Extrinsic motivation: management skill

Extrinsic motivation is usually in relation with material rewards and sometimes could be used by the employers as a kind of management skill. Speaking of management, the definition of which is the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources by employers to achieve organizational goals effectively and efficiently.

Compared with the intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation works almost the same in many ways, but because the latter one is usually in the form of money, it may make employees become more utilitarian. According to what Markus, H. R., and Kitayama,S. state in Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation(1991), we know that people’s daily behavior is usually determined by the motive to enhance one’s self-esteem, the motive to achieve, the motive to affiliate, the motive to avoid cognitive conflict, or the motive to self-actualize. If employers in a company take efficient methods to arouse its employees’ motive to work harder, its company would make more profits. But money-motive may go to the other extreme if were not well applied to practice. For example, some employees who have the strong desire to get promoted and higher salary may take some unethical measures, like elbowing out other colleagues, and bribing their leaders.

Many articles have talked about the importance of motivation and how to use it in an appropriate way. One of them focuses on the influence of national culture on motivation, in which survey method is used and the respondents of which are 108 managers of HRM from the listed companies of Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) 2008/2009. The writer of this article indicates that the differences in motivation are caused by the differences of the environment where people were raised. Therefore it is crucial for employers to take the cultural background of his or her employees into account when they are trying to motivate the employees to work harder. And here the skills taken by the employers could be called extrinsic motivation in the management of companies. The same idea is put forward in another thesis, which states that management of team members from different countries is a great challenge to today’s project managers. When motivating these subordinates, project managers should take culture background and management notion in different countries into consideration. Motivating Americans should focus on individual achievement, whereas motivating Japanese should attach importance to the group. However, for Chinese, measures which can take both individual and group factors will take effect (Li Wei, Liu, 2006). Besides, organizations should explicitly acknowledge the formidable value of cultural learning, especially the category of national culture, it fundamentally differs in the values and it can hardly change (Zhang, Ying, 2015).

4. Conclusion:

All in all, country culture can affect motivation, which is especially indicated in the management of human resources in companies around the world. Both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of employees could benefit the companies where the employees are working, if the two were well used. At the same time, we could not ignore the bad effects brought by motivation to companies and take appropriate methods to solve those problems as possible as we can.

Reference:

Mitchell, T. R. (1982). “Motivation: New Directions for Theory, Research, and Practice.” Academy of management review, 7(1), 80-88.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological review, 98(2), 224.

Suharnomo, S. (2010). “Study on Employee Motivation in Indonesia: Does culture really matter?”. IBERC, 1-18.

Li Wei, Liu. and Er Dong Zhao.(2006). “Comparison and Analysis of Employee Motivation in Cross-Culture Project Management.” The CRIOCM 2006 International Symposium on “Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate”.

Zhang, Ying. Christopher, Marquis. Sergey, Filippov. Henk-Jan, Haasnoot. Martijin van der, Steen. (2015). “The Challenges and Enhancing Opportunities of Global Project Management: Evidence from Chinese and Dutch Cross-Cultural Project Management.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No.15-063.