American Cultural Influences On Chinese Returnees

Motivating employees is an important task for managers. With increasing globalization,the number of employees with cross-cultural background is on the rise, which bringsgreat challenges for managers. Cross-cultural motivation is receiving more and moreattention. Returnees are a special group, whose work attitudes and values have beeninfluenced by foreign cultures. Returnees are different from local employees and foreignemployees. The United States is famous for its high work efficiency and advancedmanagement concept and practice. Returnees from the United States are most welcomeby enterprises. However, some surveys show that many returnees are not satisfied withtheir jobs. Companies find that it is not easy to motivate returning employees.With Hofstede's cultural dimensions as the basic theoretical framework, this thesis isdesigned to explore the American cultural influences on the work attitudes and values ofChinese returnees from the United States. National culture influences people's workattitudes and values, and in turn, work values and attitudes influence motivation. Therelationship between culture and motivation is worth studying. To have a goodunderstanding of the returnees' work values and attitudes can help managers make properand effective motivating policies.The author puts emphasis on national cultural influences on work attitudes and values.Based on Hofstede's research and other cross-cultural studies on motivation, aquestionnaire survey is conducted with 40 Chinese returnees from the United States and40 local Chinese employees for the quantitative analysis of the differences in their workattitudes and values. The questionnaire consists of 12 questions concerning workattitudes and values. Every 3 questions are grouped to reflect one cultural dimension.Interviews with the respondents are used for supplementary research.The empirical data shows that returnees have quite different work values and attitudesfrom that of the local employees. These differences reflect the national culturaldifferences between China and the United States to various extents. The differencesmainly concern the perception of power distance between superiors and subordinates,individual vs. collectivist orientation, masculine vs. feminine orientation, and uncertaintyavoidance in the work place. Some findings are out of the author's expectation and aredifferent from the hypotheses. This is natural since it just proves the complexity ofculture. At the end of this thesis, the author gives some suggestions to managers on howto better motivate returnees and local employees.So far, studies on cross-cultural motivation have mainly focused on the nationaldifferences in work attitudes, values and motivating patterns. The author suggests thatinteraction between different cultures should be a topic worth further study.