The takeaways that I received from this video on motivation are as follows: money is a motivator! If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. The relevant issue with money as a motivating factor is this: you should pay workers sufficiently enough to take the problem of money off the table. Paying any less will lead to a disgruntled employee base, paying any more would not prove beneficial. Three factors lead to better personal performance and satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the ability to find self-purpose and direction. Mastery is our desire to embody excellence in our daily lives. Purpose is a sense of contributing to society at-large. I agree with the video, in that I believe we need all three things to make an impact in the world we live in. More and more organizations are disturbing the categories that separate the definitions of profit and purpose. Profit and purpose cannot exist separately from each other, or organizations will suffer from not living up to their potential. We are to be purpose maximizers, not merely profit maximizers. We can build organizations and work-lives that make us all better off, if we take science into account. Studies are increasingly backing up this idea that you can no longer motivate people to comply via the old fashioned authoritarian managerial approach. The new workplace is fluid, dynamic, and adaptive. By going to work with a purpose in mind, we can make the world just a little bit better. Motivation to excel and live well and fulfilling lives is truly the secret ingredient to any successful profession, no matter the industry or discipline.
So, by incorporating the textbook, imagine now the life situation of an expatriate manager, some corporate officer working in an unknown and culturally different nation for his/her employer, and how someone like that could find both purpose and profit; using autonomy, mastery, and fulfillment. Human Resource management is the activates which an organization performs to utilize its human capital to maximum efficiency. HR managers are the ones put in charge to manage the people to best suit the needs of the company’s mission. An HR manager who is an expatriate must move the corporate chess pieces around the board to ensure victory in an unknown foreign environment. HR managers get to deal with the brunt of the culture-clash in global/multinationals. Their strategic roles are difficult, in that they must align the local presence of the corporation, with corporate culture back home in a tangible way. Corporate cultures can be ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric in nature. Each strategy has its pitfalls and its points of merit.
Expatriate failure rates are a very real threat. I found it quite interesting on page 516 that western expatriates fail primarily due to family discontentment, whereas eastern expatriates have the opposite issue; in that their family issues aren’t relevant as much as adapting and coping to the new environment. Page 520 goes into detail on how to minimize this risk of failure, which can be tremendously costly. Cultural training, language training, and practical training are all essential to maintaining an organization in this complex age of interdependence and global nuance. Variances in compensation packages for international employees add yet another layer of complexity (524). Labor unions and lack thereof are another element which should be included in this discussion.
The takeaway here from all this, is that proper human resource management is critical to a company’s success. As corporations become more intertwined and global, these considerations can be the factor in having an advantage over one’s competitors.
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In the short video by Danile Pink “RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us” he explains motivation and what drives us. He asks the question from a study done “if you reward something do you get more of the behavior you want?” or “if you punish something do you get less of the behavior you want?” The study showed that incentives were given in three stages. The less productive you were the less reward you would get and the most productive would get the most reward. The test showed that when mechanical skills were put on display the more people worked for the better incentive, it drove them toward a goal. But once the task caused for rudimentary cognitive skills the larger reward caused for poorer performance. Which means when a task gets more complicated and it requires creative thinking, incentives such as money do not work. Money only motives the mechanical skills that have a definitive solution. If I do this, this will happen. There are 3 factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction, Autonomy (Direct ones life), mastery (To get better), and purpose (meaning). These three factors make for one self to come up with ideas that only you as an individual or as a team will master and make better for his or her own purpose, and not because of an incentive to have a purpose. An example in the video was a guy playing a guitar, why is he playing the guitar if he isn’t getting paid for it? Because he had his own incentive to get better at playing the guitar and his only purpose was to get better at it, it was satisfying and fun. The purpose motive is what drove Steve Jobs to change the world and the way we think and uses technology today.
Chapter 16 “Global Human Resource Management “ hits on some concepts that relate to the video, such as Human Resource Management, which refers to the activities an organization carries out to use its human resources effectively. “HRM function must deal with a host of issues. It must decide how to staff key management posts in the company, how to develop managers so they are familiar with nuances of doing business in different countries, how to compensate people in different nations, and how to evaluate the performance of mangers based in different countries.” (P.509) I thought this concept related to the video because the HRM has to make decisions based on who is fit for what job and they evaluate performance, mechanical skills talked about in the video. The concept of corporate culture also relates to the video because with corporate culture, “we mean the organizations norms and value system”(P. 511) a strong corporate culture can help a firm implements its strategy. For example when a company is hiring people who have skills required for a particular job, and they want individuals to behave a certain way, have the same beliefs, and have all the same values. I thought this concept related to the video in the sense that if you hiring all the same people, you aren’t getting much cognitive thinking and creativity flowing around the office, you are hiring solely on mechanical skills.
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