How Culture and Motivation Interacts? : - A Cross-Cultural Study

Sammanfattning: Motivating employees is essential for any organization aspiring to succeed. However, the process of motivating is not straightforward due to the diversity of individual’s needs. The task has been made even more difficult by the fact that personalized needs have altered in recent years. For instance, in many circumstances financial compensation is not considered as the main motivational factor of employees. Therefore, various other motivational practices have been developed, which take into consideration such issues as the work environment and the job itself. This thesis is a comparative study between Sweden and Finland. The study has an objective of exploring how corporate culture affects the use of motivational practices in the Information Technology industry. According to the findings gathered from two organizations, Sasken Finland Oy and SYSteam, culture does influence the choice of motivational practices. The issue of how culture affects, depends on whether corporate culture is task or person-oriented.