In this article, Dan Woog, a contributing writer at monster.com, discusses the challenges of motivating employees from cultures other than your own. He suggests three steps to help ease this sometimes challenging task and maintain a harmonious and multicultural work environment. The first is interpretations; the second, expectations; and the third, positive reinforcement.
After reading this article, do you agree with Mr. Woog’s ideas? Do you think these three steps are sufficient to combat motivation across cultures in the workplace? Or do you think this issue is more complex? Offer some advice to global managers as to the best way to motivate multicultural employees.
6 comments:
Posted by: Edie Miller & Maria Bertuso
I think that many situations can be more complicated than this, but this seems to be a really good place to start when dealing with cross-cultural motivation. I think the most important step is interpretation. The solutions to motivating different employees will be different, but the first step will always be to understand what causes the undesired behavior. If you don't understand why an employee behaves as he or she does, then your approach to correcting the behavior will be a wild guess rather than a precise calculation.
I think these 3 steps make a good starting level. But of course you would have to go into further depth in order to motivate others more effectively. For example even when dealing with so,some from your own culture, these techniques would not be enough to effectively motivate someone. Here to effectively motivate someone you must know them on a personal level. Understand what works for them, and tailor your managing skill to each person in order to get what you would like done. But this is a good base ground.
I agree that the article provides a good foundation, but misses some potentially crucial points. While the manager should definitely ask the employee why his assignment was late, for example, the manager should keep in mind that the employee likely isn't going to say, "because I did not feel like doing it." If the employee points to a lack of communication, the employer should ask others involved in the communication to verify the cause. This does not imply that the manager does not trust the employee's word, but rather a protocol should be in place so that the manager is able to readily identiy situations that may result from cultural differences, versus ones caused by character flaws. I strongly agree with the last two points, where employers should clarify expectations and provide positive reinforcement. With these, I would add that the manager should also understand the individual; two people from the same cultural background may respond to praise very differently.
I agree with the other that this provides a good foundation and that his three steps are a good place to start, but I also think that in motivating others from various cultures, one needs to adapt their style and make adjust it to each case. Motivating people from different cultures is something that will take a lot of practice and a lot of understanding in the backgrounds of each person you are attempting to motivate.
Positive reinforcement is always the best motivator, in my opinion. People get disheartened to easily by negative reinforcement, and sometimes people give up easily. With positive reinforcement, however, people are always trying to get positive feedback/rewards, and they can only be encouraged not discouraged. Finding out what the positive motivators are for people of different cultures are is the trick in this way of motivating though.
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