ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the challenge of understanding what motivates employees and management across cultural boundaries. Motivating across borders or cultural contexts complicates matters and makes motivation an even bigger challenge. The chapter presents series of action steps that international managers can take to develop synergistic solutions to motivation issues. International managers must understand how cultures can shape employee motivation in given country and then be able to gauge effect of particular program within that company and country. Overall, managers should carefully take cultural variables into account while designing reward systems and motivational strategies. The chapter looks at some motivational theories that have been popular and widely applied in workplaces throughout United States and other Western countries. Process-based theories are viewpoints that focus on how motivation unfolds over time and the processes involved. The central idea behind reinforcement theory is that the best way to motivate is to clearly link valued consequences to desired behaviors, a process that unfolds over time.
