Cultural diversity: National culture and its impact on motivation

Abstract

One of the important factors affecting the organisation culture is the national culture of a country in which the company operates. Nation’s culture can be defined as values, expectations and behaviours learned and shared by a group of people, passed down from generation to generation. National culture impacts organisation’s standards and values. And furthermore, national culture significantly affects also its business relations and employee motivation.

Organisations and society have become increasingly more globalised and multicultural. It is common that the workplace involves more than one culture (Winch, 2015, p. 85). Since this article involves Asian, American and European companies, the three cultures are selected as the focus. Yet, still the companies’ operations, financial results and workers’ motivation are strongly influenced by national cultures of the countries in which the organizations are active.

The article aims to specify what is the role of diversity management and how much influence the national culture can have on the employee motivation and business processes in multicultural companies on the example of chosen European, American and Asian companies. Therefore, in this article it has been tried to establish the differences in management of international corporations and the influence of European, American and Asian culture on the particular company. The practical objective of this article, however, is to examine a degree to which management based on culture should be implemented and to demonstrate a change in the importance of the intercultural diversity.

For the purpose of the research the standardized and formalized questionnaire has been prepared. The questions were mainly closed questions, there was also one open question. From the analysis of the study it appears that the national culture of the company’s origin country has little influence on management and motivation model in the company.