From Local to Cross-Cultural to Global Work Motivation and Innovation

This chapter examines three phases of a programmatic research on work motivation. Phase one focuses on research on work motivation prior to considering the effect of culture on work motivation. This research identifies two boundary conditions of the goal-setting theory of motivation—knowledge of results, and goal commitment—two necessary conditions for goals to affect performance. It continues to examine the effect of participation in goal setting on goal acceptance and its consequent performance and discovers cross-cultural differences in the effect of participation on goal acceptance and performance. This has opened up phase two, which focuses on cross-cultural differences and similarities in work motivation. Phase three has paralleled the change toward a global, culturally diverse and geographically dispersed work context. This context stimulates new research questions and research paradigms that have specifically focused on understanding how to motivate employees’ behaviors in the global context and enhance their sense of belongingness to their multicultural teams.