Motivation - Admission/Application Essay Example

Employee motivation The system of values of every company is a basis of personnel motivationsystem development. Certainly, there are no universal schemes: each organization, depending on corporate culture, experience in the market and style of management, chooses the way of motivation.Robbins defined motivation as follows: “the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organizational goals, conditioned by the effort’s ability to satisfy some individual need” (cited in Ramlall, 2004) .

Motivation, in my opinion, is based on several main points – from income and accurately predicted career growth to personal needs in respect, recognition of personal contribution to the common business of the company and the opportunity to feel yourself important in the company’s mechanism. The individual motivation is under the influence of the following factors:- individual requirements;- personal understanding of justice;- remuneration;- social norms and beliefs;- personal values.Thus, the preferences in motivation are highly dependent on the cultural values of a person.

Now we can trace a process globalization of business and cultural life, which is characterized by general consumer culture, common tastes. The international cooperation and competition is developing. We all understand that a chief sometimes can inspire an employee by one word or a glance, as well as easily demotivate him. Different companies and researchers working at international markets began to pay more attention to the answer to the question: "What the successful head of the international business should be?

”For example the cultural differences became an obstacle to the cooperation of Korean and Russian employees in the company LG Electronics in 2011. The principles of Asian management have their own features: hierarchy, respect for the status, age, hypertrophied sense of responsibility, which is expressed in long working hours, high demands on subordinates. One day HR specialists found out that the cultural differences between Koreans and Russians became an obstacle to effective work, thus corresponding measures should have been taken.

According to Qin, “In order to develop a motivated working group in a cross-cultural organization, having a good understanding of some basic motivation factors is not nearly enough. It is extremely essential to explore how employees who are from different cultural backgrounds react diversely to the same motivation factors, as culture has a profound effect on human‘s relief and behaviour” (Qin, 2010, p.6). The heads of LG Electronics devoted the whole conference to the issue. In order to correct the situation the staff of the personnel department interviewed the representatives of Korean and Russian managements to have a “picture of the world” of each party.

Then the Korean employees learned about Russian cultural peculiarities and Russians found out much about the values of Koreans. Finally the strategy directed at improving cross-cultural skills was worked-out.It is difficult to understand the values of a certain individual, but most of the people who grew up in one national culture have the same values, and for this reason it is important to know them to build the effective program of motivation.ReferencesRamlall, S. (2004). A review of employee motivation theories and their implications for employee retention within organizations.

The Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge, 5 (1/2), 52-63.Qin, Li. (2010). Employee motivation in a cross-cultural organization. Arcada University of Applied Sciences. Department of Business Administration, Media and Technology, Helsinki