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
