LITERATURE REVIEW - The Effects of the Personal Characteristics, Cross-Cultural Adaptation and

Chapter Overview

This chapter provides a review of relevant literature reviews assisting the researcher in order to address the impact of cross-cultural adaptation, foreign workers personal profile and their work satisfaction over their commitment and performance in Taiwan. The researcher will provide an insight of each of these variables. Various theories and measurements of these variables will be presented, highlighting the sub-variables of each of them. Finally, the researcher will focus on describing the relationship between variables through the Hypothesis Building.

To give a real sense to this literature review, all researchers have been listed and sorted into several categories. The competencies considered as cross-cultural coming from the different literature review collected will be clustered using a Q-sort methodology. Boyatzis (1998)’s Q Methodology is a research method used in psychology and in social sciences to study people's

"subjectivity"—that is, their viewpoint. This way of clustering on a conceptual basis has been suggested because clustering based on conceptual thinking enables researchers to determinate more precisely the different anomalies lying in the data and to have more proactive role in the clustering itself.

Moreover, review about the relationship between work satisfaction and job performance will be explained on both qualitative aspect and quantitative aspect. The study between this relationship is a kind of classic tradition of research in the field of the organizational psychology. This relationship has been well-described as the favorite topic of work of industrial psychologists (Landy, 1989).

The reason is that the curiosity over the relation between the attitude individuals can have in their workplace and their actual productivity dates back to the study of Hawthorne (Roethlisberger

& Dickson, 1939). Moreover, this subject keep being exposed and written even nowadays. This topic has abundant qualitative and quantitative (Laffaldano & Muchinsky, 1985) literature reviews to support the arguments of the research. It is also important to stress that those empirical reviews have to be examined with care. Plus, as lots of progress in the past decades that deserve to get the debate reopen over integration in this literature

Work Satisfaction

Economists such as Maslow and Herzberg, says that satisfied workers has a trend to be more performant and efficient in their work, creative in their task and committed to their own subordinates. The employee's commitment is directly linked with the improvement of the productivity, and the general growth of the company. For this reason, work satisfaction, skills, and motivation are different factors leading employees to a greater achievement.

Compensation and Work Satisfaction

The humanist academician Maslow (1970) released the essay Motivation and Personality.

He explained that based on his research as a psychologist, a regular pattern of needs of recognition and satisfaction is sought by humans. He raised that people could not identify and pursue the next higher need in the hierarchy their current needs are not completely satisfied. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is shown in the Figure 1. In all, it is composed of 5 levels: the physiological dimension (also called basic survival), physical and mental safety with a daily sense and need for security, sense of belonging, and most secondary levels, the sense of accomplishment (a need of reward through creativity and the feeling that we still « actual and available » for the growing market).

Finkelstein.

On the other hand, we have the Herzberg's theory, that actually suggests that there are 2 main groups of reasons that can be used as 2 different factors: hygiene and motivation. The conclusion of his theory is that salary constitutes the strongest motivating factor, by far the most substantial of the 12 other factors of his survey. For the academicians Bellott and Tutor (1990), the problem with Herzberg's study is that it was done in 1959, and is no more relevant. Plus, they argue that he didn’t take into account some professions where they assume realization is important, such as teachers.

Other literatures also disserted over the relationship work satisfaction and subjective well-being. Although the world’s Gross National Product (GNP) has generally increased over the past century, levels of well-being and work satisfaction didn’t increase since the 1950's (Diener & Oishi, 2000). The same study has been effected in Asia (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002). Furthermore, on a short span of time, people earning a lot of money at the lottery don’t feel happier than there was before (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff, 1978). These results bring up the conclusion that salary is not important to work satisfaction.

The system of compensation of workers is parted into two categories: the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards (Bruvik & Gibson, 2010). The intrinsic rewards are issued from a psychological mindset that employees are experiencing in their workplace. In the other hand, the extrinsic reward relates the pay and benefit of employees, that they generally receive as an outcome of their contribution to the company. The most important way to bring value to a company is extrinsic compensation (Lai, 2012).

The extrinsic compensation takes into account more than simply the salary. It also comprises the remuneration, benefits and allowances that workers earn for all their services (Bhattacharya &

Sengupta, 2009).

A research lead by Opkara (2004) and Samad (2007) has shown that if workers are fully satisfied with their work, and also feel satisfied with the organizational environment comprising their coworkers, compensation, and leadership they will be more committed in their company. In the same way, logic says that the higher the compensation will be, the more workers will be satisfied with their job and also strive for their company. From this assessment the researcher can safely rise the hypotheses compensation has a direct significant effect on organizational commitment.

Culture and Work Satisfaction

Culture itself is a product of a group of people living at the same place and having similar attitudes and behavior. People who belong to a certain culture share similar norms, history, religion, values and artifacts which distinguish them from others. Therefore, there are numerous national cultures and even more subcultures, providing certain types of organization and action.

However, culture is considered to be a tangible or intangible environment in which a group of people live and work together (Gjuraj, 2013).

On an organizational aspect, the term culture is defined by the influence and interaction between employees, and their relationship with their institution or organization. Because of that, current multinational organizations are regarded as being social groups. To lead research about an organization’s culture is important to describe and analysis this organizational phenomenon (Tharp, 2009). One important features to keep good organizational culture is the trust that share all the members of one same group of workers (Rotter, 1980). The organizational trust in the workplace is fostered when members can trust and lean on each other (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). This confidence is the base to say that actions team members will lead to good results and that those same team members would not act in an unexpected way (Narusn & Narus, 1991).

With a huge number of multinationals across the world, it is normal that the well-being of foreign workers has value to the eyes of a lot of extensive researches. This well-being in the multinational can be defined as the way in which its function and quality are perceived by employees (Warr, 1992). It comprises the workers both physical and psychological health, feeling of happiness and well-being through social integration in the company. All of these features are leading to “job satisfaction” (Grant, Christianson, & Price, 2007). Work satisfaction is very often investigated and utilized as indicators and variables in organizational culture, behavior and numerous other phenomena related to work, including supervision (Warr, 1992). Most of the time, work satisfaction relates the feeling of a worker toward his job. Some theoricians has revealed that work satisfaction is a phenomenon with various dimensions, undergoing the influence of both internal and external factors (Schurr & Ozanne, 1985). To raise some example of these factors:

values, principles, personality and expectations and the job’s nature, etc.

Confidence and shared trust entail an honest communication of ideas, beliefs and group goals and topics, including satisfaction or dissatisfaction with information partners and finding solutions to issues through communication (Zand, 1972). Relationships based on trust can withstand more stress and more strongly adapt to challenges. Honest communication of ideas, and setting social

goals and collaboration increases target compatibility, foster link between people relationships and between key partners in organizations. However, the relationship of measuring confidence and organizational trust at any point in time can be misleading. The degree of trust is the result of immediate past experiences, that means it can change very quick and bring new positive or negative changes suddenly. For this reason, it is difficult to take the right measure of the degree of trust between two individuals (Zand, 1972).

Perspective of Evolution and Work Satisfaction

The perspective of evolution and promotion also play an substantial part of an employee’s career and decision making. The academicians Feldman and Thomas (1992) put in light the Perceived Career Path theory. The state that there is a direct linkage between the work satisfaction of foreign employees and their perception of their career path and future career opportunities within the organization. Their dedication to their mission is then greatly impacted by their ideas of future career development after their assignment (Selmer, 1998).

They represent an important reason of worker’s mobility and turnover rate, and they often bring interesting wage increases (Kosteas, 2009). They also have an important influence on other work characteristics such as responsibilities and sub assignments (Pergamit & Veum, 1999).

Multinational organization are actually, through promotions, rewarding their most productive performers, producing an incentive for other employees to put in even more effort, and incenting perspective of evolution in the company. (Francesconi, 2001). Those promotions will have the desired outcomes only if workers are interested in a significant way to the promotion (or its perspective) itself. If employees don’t have high considerations of it, organizations would just increase the paycheck to reward workers that deserves it (Blau & DeVaro, 2007).

Employees generally value promotions for the reason that they bring more important job amenities such as a larger office, or a better location. The need of acknowledgement of their task is also playing a role, that will flatter their ego (McCue, 1996). When promoted, in most of case, workers appreciate the increase in authority over their colleagues.

With all the aspects of promotions that has an impact on worker career, only few focus has been put to the importance of promotions as an indicator of work satisfaction. Some studies have already searched over variables of work satisfaction, but relatively few focus was put to the impact of promotions and promotion expectations. The tournament theory argues that organizations use promotions as a way to exert employees to provide a greater effort (Francesconi, 2001).

Trying to assess to which extent promotions and promotion expectations on work satisfaction enables the understanding of the way their mechanism is working to foster more effort from employees. Assuming that those two notions are related supports the idea that employees have more interest in the promotion itself. It also enables companies to foster effort with other tools and have the positive behavior they wished from their employees. Along with promotions, promotion expectations have a strong incidence as well. An employee understanding that he is not going to earn a promotion may have negative effect on his behavior and decrease the total of his effort unless he thinks that there is still hope to get another promotion in the future (Pergamit & Veum, 1999).

Cross-Cultural Adaptation

As the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) took the decision to open Taiwan’s borders to more foreign workers from October 1989, their adaptation has become an important issue. The government and organization jointly strive to avoid them suffering from a “sense of unsettling discontinuity, malaise, and nostalgia for the age of certainty, permanence, and a fixed and unitary cultural identity”.

Social Integration and Cross-Cultural Adaptation

The term adaptation refers to “changes that take place in individuals or groups in response to environmental demands” (Berry, 1997). It “implies the process of learning to function in or feel comfortable in a new environment” (Shaules, 2007). In order to study if foreign workers undertake psychological and mental changes and change their mindset from one cultural background to another, the term cross-cultural adaptation was used widely. In the first place, because of the huge influx of foreigners to developed countries from the 1930s’, the concept of cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 2000) has been highlighted since this time. Little by little, foreign workers adopt some features from their new cultural environment their original cultural customs are gradually fading away (Kim, 2005). By adjusting their standards to the new host environment, this process reduces conflicts and enables an adjustment of their personal features a habits through reaction or withdrawal (Berry, 1980). Kim (2005) gave a definition of cross-cultural adaptation as follow: “the entirety of the phenomenon of individuals who, upon relating to an unfamiliar socio-cultural environment, strive to establish and maintain a relatively stable, reciprocal, and functional relationship with the environment.

One of the most crucial features to keep going with good social relationships is the underlying trust between members of the social unit (Rotter, 1980). Similar to a social context, trust is fostered and sustained when people have confidence into each other regarding their reliability and independence (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Trust supports beliefs that the actions of people will lead to beneficial outcomes and that people will not take unexpected actions that will result in benefits and outcomes (Anderson & Narus, 1991).

Schumann (1978) wrote the Acculturation Theory and disserted about the learning process of a second language as a way to gradually integrate and adapt to a culture. Church (1982) addressed that to extend the cross-cultural adaptation, and individual should be as much as possible exposed to host environments, with different languages, behaviors, regulations, eating habits and educational systems (Schurr & Ozanne, 1985).

The social network theory has recently been utilized in various researches, for more relational and contextual understandings (Borgatti, Brass, Labianca, & Mehra, 2009). Basically used in the field of sociology, this theory argues that people, groups, or organizations, as social actors, are linked into a network. It put the emphasize on their relationships and try to review what characteristics are arising from the relational system (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). There are various types of relation constituting the networks and they lead to different functions (a network of friends is not the same as network of coworkers, even though they may get closer is that it enables and facilitate the flow of information from a member to another. The advantage created from the relationships is called social capital (Burt, 2005).

Adaptation to the Lifestyle and Cross-Cultural Adaptation

The theory supports the facts that even since the main goal is a plenty successful adaptation into the host society, a transformation of the personal identity has to be notified (even though this transformation is largely unconscious and may lead to significant changes into the intercultural personhood (Berry, 1997).

The fact that cross-cultural adaptation occurs is something that can’t be denied, because time can forge anything according to Lysgaard (1955). He is also the author who first draw the well know U-curve.

Figure 1.2. U-Curve theory of Cultural Adjustment. Adapted from "Adjustment in a Foreign Society: Norwegian Fulbright Grantees Visiting the United States.", by Lysgaard S., 1955, International Social Science Bulletin, 7, p45. Copyright 2007 by Culturosity.com.

Choices have to be made: the first one can be represented by the quantity of change that we could be willing to undergo and accept. In other word, how many percent of our own culture and education we will be willing to sacrifice in order to accept and be influenced by the new culture we are embracing. The second choice is that in the case we refuse the change, we can minimize the change by trying to ignore most of the things that are happening around us (Shaules, 2007). But in the other side, if we adopt the perfect opposite behavior, then we may put in even more adaptive efforts, and we can maximize it to achieve a full commitment in the task we are daily doing. When encountering obstacles in a new environment, putting aside one different small problems and even forgetting some of one common and basic cultural patterns can be a necessity. This is for a greater good that workers will in the end, overcome the change of the reality, and confront themselves to the globalizing world we are living in.

The academician Oberg (1960) is usually credited for presenting the widely known concept of culture shock. He defines this notion as an “occupational disease...the anxiety that results from losing all of our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse” such as customs and words. Other

authors such as Adler (1975) have rather dined this notion in a more general term and called it

“transition shock,”. According to him, it is a slow process where people can experience “profound learning, self-understanding and change.”

Another theorician, Zaharna (1989) added the notion of “self shock,” highlighting the

“double-binding challenge of identity”. This new notion of “self shock” comprises a loss and a lack of communication ability because of our upset self-reflections. Ward, Okura, Kennedy and Kojima (1998) have point out the social stake and challenges that workers have to face with their “strange”

new situation and host culture. They found more of a linear, progressive process of psychological adjustment versus the initial stage of the U-curve hypothesis of Lysgaard (1955). They argue that workers have more problems to adjust to the culture at the beginning of there stay, and will have less problem over time.

As a result, integration is a long task that requires us to take important decisions and to be aware for the outcomes. It is up to people whether they want to feel integrate within the population taking them. People who integrated with success and overcome the cultural differences are the same ones who will decide in the end to adapt and to realize some changes on themselves

Language Proficiency and Cross-Cultural Adaptation

In order to interact smoothly when having cross-cultural exchange, the communication plays the role of the major pillar (Tung, 1993). It is the only way to share objectives, feelings, and ideas in order to succeed in business (Ulijn & Strother, 1995), state that the key is that managers focus on behavioral aspect and the way they communicated. This ability is regarded as a precondition to management, especially between partners from different cultures (Limaye & Victor, 1991).

Schumann (1978) wrote the Acculturation Theory and disserted about the learning process of a second language as a way to gradually integrate and adapt to a culture. He also argued that there is a relationship between the adaptation to a culture and the degree we master its language, because this level determines the level of understanding of the host language. Church (1982) addressed that to extend the cross-cultural adaptation, and individual should be as much as possible exposed to host environments, with different languages, behaviors, regulations, eating habits and educational systems.

Yeh (1999) defined the social integration and adaptation as a psychological combination between the individual learning and what his is target. Thus, the social distances between learners and the culture he is living in is the most important variable, having an influence on the second

language. Plus, both learners and members of the host culture are hoping that the second language

在文檔中 The Effects of the Personal Characteristics, Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Work Satisfaction of Foreign Workers in Taiwan on their Organizational Commitment and Employee’s Performance (頁 23-47)