Moroten som försvann med standardiseringen - En studie om standardisering av bonussystem i Skandinavien

Sammanfattning: In recent years an increasing amount of multinational corporations export their HRM-practices from the global head office to foreign subsidiaries. One of these practices that face standardisation are bonus systems. Since one of the primary goals with a bonus system is to achieve an increase in employee motivation, it is of interest to investigate how a standardised bonus system may affect the motivation. Additionally, this is an area that is well debated but not sufficiently researched. Hence, to understand the effect of standardising a bonus system to a foreign subsidiary this study conducted in-depth interviews with employees in three subsidiaries of a multinational corporation. The subsidiaries were all located in Scandinavia and the bonus system originated from the parent company in the United Kingdom. Our main findings are that the lack of adoption to the institutional context of the subsidiaries leads to low internalisation. This in turn implied that we could observe a low or non-affected employee motivation. Furthermore, we discovered that the internalisation was affected by the information flow from, and the relationship with, the parent company. Finally, a decoupling effect was recognised which resulted in a disrupted company culture.