How Cultural Differences Affect Job Satisfaction

International Organizational Behavior-Cultural Differences in Job Satisfaction and Motivation

As the forces of globalization continue to reshape the international marketplace, understanding cross-cultural differences in job satisfaction and motivation has assumed new importance and relevance. To this end, this paper provides a comparison of the United States with two of its major trading partners, China and Canada, drawing on Geert Hofstede's five cultural dimensions. A comparison of the U.S. with these two countries using Hofstede's five cultural dimensions is followed by an analysis concerning how various job factors contribute to satisfaction in different cultures. Finally, a summary of the research and important findings concerning the implications of cross-cultural factors for international organizational behaviorists in promoting job satisfaction and motivation are presented in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

While it is reasonable to suggest that the overwhelming majority of people in the world work to earn a living, making pay and benefits among the most important predictors of job satisfaction and motivation, it is also reasonable to suggest that there are other factors involved that differ from culture to culture. Clearly, these are important issues for multinational corporations that may have operations in dozens of different countries. At present, Canada and China are two of the largest trading partners with the United States (U.S. economy, 2015), and growing numbers of American corporations have established operations in these countries in recent years. Some indication of the level of congruence between the cultures in these three countries can be discerned from an application of Hofstede's five cultural dimensions as shown in Table 1 and depicted graphically in Figure 1 below.

Table 1

Comparison of Hofstede's cultural dimensions: U.S., Canada, and China

Country

Power Distance

Individualism

Masculinity

Uncertainty Avoidance

Long-Term Orientation

U.S.

40

91

62

46

26

Canada

39

80

52

48

36

China

80

20

66

30

87

Source: Hofstede (2015) at http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html

Figure 1. Comparison of Hofstede's cultural dimensions: U.S., Canada, and China

Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html

As can be seen from the data in Table 1 and Figure 1 above, the U.S. and Canada are nearly mirror images of each other from Hofstede's perspective, but both of these countries differ significantly from China in every cultural dimension except masculinity. One area that has specific implications for employee motivation and job satisfaction is the cultural dimension of power distance (PDI) which was defined by Hofstede as being "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally" (cited in Rau & Liu, 2013, p. 162).

The significant differences between the U.S./Canada and China in this dimension suggest that employees in the former prefer opportunities to participate in the decision-making process, especially as it affects their jobs, while Chinese employees would expect (and prefer) higher-ranking managers making decisions on their behalf if they are autocratic and paternalistic in nature (Rau & Liu, 2013). Like their Western counterparts, though, Chinese employees are also motivated by timely developmental feedback from superiors, but developmental feedback in particular has been shown to have a significant positive effect on Chinese employees' intrinsic motivation compared to Western workers, also reflecting the significant differences in the PDI dimension (Guo & Liao, 2014).