Chapter 10. Management, motivation and communication across cultures

• Communication in intercultural environment
• Theories of motivation and motivators in various cultures
• Intercultural differences in attitude towards work and career
• Intercultural management challenges
• Variety of labor relations and compensation
• Multicultural teams and communication in them
• Negotiations in multicultural environment
• Questions for chapter review
• Chapter bibliography

This chapter focuses on communication, employee motivation, and the peculiarities of negotiations in different cultural clusters. At the beginning of the chapter, the features of intercultural communication are described in detail, which are important both when the company’s employees communicate with customers or business partners from another cultural cluster, and when they communicate with each other within the company, when employees in different countries of the world or from different countries of the world work in a global company (Deresky, 2007).

Particular attention in this chapter is devoted to theories of motivation developed by such scientists as Maslow, Vroom, McClealland, Herzberg, McGregor. However, in different cultural clusters, the theories of these famous scientists work differently, because the cultural dimensions, beliefs, attitudes and value systems of employees differ. In the chapter, the relation between the motivation criteria of various motivation theories and how it works in different cultural clusters under the influence of a certain cultural dimension are described in structured manner.

The reader can also find cross-cultural differences in attitudes to work and careers, different relationships between employees and established norms in different cultural clusters. The chapter also focuses on labor relations, work and rest rules, holidays, salary differences in different countries. These differences help the reader to understand the working principles of global companies, why work that requires a lot of labor is transferred to countries with a lower standard of living, why factories and the textile industry, which produces the products of the most famous brands in the USA and Western Europe, are concentrated in Asia.

The chapter describes the specifics of working in teams made up of people from different cultures, as well as negotiations and their characteristics, which differ greatly between cultural clusters. This chapter reveals a very large inequality between people in labor relations in different countries. Global companies are actively working to exploit this specific intercultural knowledge and thus secure a competitive advantage due to lower labor costs and more flexible working conditions, including a higher workload per employee.

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