THE MOTIVATIONAL PROCESS ACROSS CULTURES: EXPERIMENT ON MOROCCAN & UKRAINIAN SUBJECT

Abstract

Motivation is the driver of the performance in the workplace, as it is the energy that leads and maintains the effort of the worker. Since the early years of the 19th century researchers gave more importance to it. Therefore several theories have been developed to explain what motivation is, what motivates, or demotivates people and what environment is the most suitable to reinforce motivation. However, most of the main authors on this field recognized the importance of the culture in the motivation process, sources and consequences, and yet, they did not demonstrate what specific elements of the motivational process vary from a culture to another. This paper tries to explore the main motivation theories and merge them into a model of motivational process. Then, based on that model, we set an experiment to see what steps of the motivational process are being influenced by the culture. This experiment, consists of a group of tasks to be performed by participants from Morocco and Ukraine and the observation of their behaviour towards them. The importance of this work is about understanding if yes or no, the motivation can vary from a culture to another, and what specific elements can actually vary. These answers would attract further questions for following researches as what specificities of cultures can generate what precise influence on what element of the motivational process.

Keywords

• motivation
• culture
• human resource management
• intercultural management