Personnel motivation in multinational companies : standardization and adaptation

Abstract: With the increasing emergence of multinational companies and the increased popularity of these companies, the question of the organization of their activities becomes interesting for the HR community worldwide. These companies are renowned for deliberate management structure of human resources and their effective use. For effective use of employees’ skills and knowledge the company has to constantly motivate them by intrinsic and extrinsic motivational tools. Motivational tools which use a company may be different depending on specific features of the country that the office is located. The purpose of this research is the study of how multinational companies organize the motivational system in different countries taking into account cultural characteristics and needs of the personnel in the offices of a particular country. On the basis of data derived from interviews with 12 representatives of 6 companies (4 of them Swedish companies, Oriflame, SCA, Volvo, IKEA, and two American companies, IBM and Deloitte, that have representative offices in Sweden and in Russia) it was revealed that modern multinational companies use similar motivational tools that partly standardized to keep the specifics of the company, and partly adapted to the local requirements.