Beyond monetary motivation: the moderation of Hofstede's cultural dimensions

Purpose

This study explicitly examines how Hofstede's cultural dimensions moderate the relationship between nonmonetary motivation factors and performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Through the simple random sampling technique, the hypotheses were tested with a sample of 604 employees from a mobile telecommunication company operating in both China and Ghana, two countries that represent two same and opposite cultural poles on Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

Findings

The results point that employee motives such as relationship, supervision, challenging work and achievement are moderated by cultural values. Whilst employees with high power distance cultural values are highly motivated by high supervision, those with low individualistic cultural values are highly motivated by high relationship. The results also depict that whilst the interaction effects between supervision and power distance and relationship and individualism on performance were marginal for both China and Ghana samples, the interaction effect of achievement and masculinity as well as challenging work and uncertainty avoidance on performance had great differences due to the different cultural values for the two countries.

Practical implications

This study implies that, as organizations are devising strategies to lower personnel costs in a recessionary period, there is the need to redesign motivation factors that go beyond monetary means and based on the cultural background of an employee in order to improve performance.

Originality/value

This is one of the few studies that focused on nonmonetary motives from a cultural management perspective with samples from emerging economies.