Cross-cultural motivation

Cross-cultural motivation is an interesting area of the psychology of motivation and is important for clinicians providing psychotherapy services because it looks at human behavior at the foundation of human experience regardless of environmental/cultural influences. Some motivational theories are confounded by cultural beliefs, such as expectancy theory, and others are not confounded by cultural beliefs, such as intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in specific contexts. In the context of learning environments, intrinsic motivation does not appear to have a cultural influenced bias (Artelt, 2005) because the incentive to learn is shown to be entirely within the learner exclusive of their cultural influences. The study completed by Artelt (2005) has some interesting outcomes. This study suggests that learners from different countries describe intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in a different and comparable way, but their performance was similar on similar difficulty tasks. For example, Korean students said they were not interested in the reading task and Brazilian students said they were interested in the reading task but both populations performed the same. The conflict that arises in this study is how to explain intrinsic motivation as a normative theory in idiosyncratic contexts. Latham's (2011, p. 166) discussion of societal culture highlights the need to consider the cultural concept of individualism-based societies and collectivist societies. Each of these has conscious and subconscious beliefs and values inherited by the individual who then makes meaning of what motivation is to them. Therefore, intrinsic motivation in a collectivist culture will be described differently than in an individualist culture but they will both be intrinsically motivated as Artelt’s study suggests regardless of country of origin. The conclusion I take away here is we must be careful on how motivational systems are communicated and measured with our clients by understanding the cultural foundation of the individuals we work with within psychotherapy.