The major purposes of this thesis are to investigate the key relationships among national cultures, job characteristics and organizational effectiveness and to search for the desirable solutions of motivating foreign workers in overseas operations.
The national culture's four dimensions, six job characteristics, four aspects of organizational effectiveness and two moderator factors are constructed from Hofstede's national culture theory, Hackman's job design theory, and the organizational effectiveness studies. Those variables are empirically tested in four overseas sites and one domestic factory.
This study draws qualitative and quantitative method, it means, designed interviews and questionnaire method have been done. Three to four local managers and employees in five operations were chosen for the interviews. All available Korean expatriates in four overseas sites were interviewed and previously designed interview guides were used.
The questionnaires are administered to around 435 employees who belong to five sites in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea. Respondants are asked to rate the items mainly on the 7-points scale, and the data were analyzed by SAS. The quality of the data was confirmed by a careful review over all answers, and the careless responses which recorded 33 were rejected. Final number of effective questionnaires was 402 in total.
In order to analyze the collected data, Pearson correlation, Duncan-test, Stepwise regression analysis, Sub-group analysis are taken. Major findings are as follows;
First, the job characteristics perceived by employees are different according to each plant. The relationships between national cultures and job characteristics turned out to be correlated but the relationships are not so strong.
Second, the correlations between job characteristics and organizational effectiveness are positive and high, but the independence among job dimensions is very week.
Third, task significance is the most important job dimension.
Fourth, out of two moderator factors, growth need strength is founded to have positive moderating effect but job context satisfaction has no significant one. Demographic variables are generally found to have the moderating effect except sex, job status and marriage.
Fifth, desirable solutions for each site were different. And the solutions should be adaptive to the national cultures.
There are some implications for implementing job redesign method to motivate workers on this thesis. However the problem of validity can be raised because the sample is focused on one global oriented company and the survey is done mainly for the operators.
In conclusion, even job characteristics theory is moving from the status of a well-arranged given to a more questionable status, it is still a useful method to encourage the employees and to make an effective organizations. In addition, the importance of cultural differences should be regarded as a key factor to make the overseas operations more effective and successful because each national culture is one of the important influential factors on the motivation process of local employees.
