Management trainings often cut out the cross-cultural nature of leadership expectations, hierarchies, and values and norms.

So, when you’re put into a cross-cultural leadership position, you’re a fish out of water, and you don’t have much to guide you.

Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”

In Maslow’s theory, human motivation is pretty straight forward.

His “hierarchy of needs” is taught across many business administration curriculums and has been since its inception in the early ’40s.

It was in 1943 that researcher Abraham Maslow identified basic human needs and categorized them in a pyramid.

At the bottom are the most basic physiological needs:

Food

Shelter

Safety

When a person’s most basic human needs are satisfied, their more complex emotional and psychological needs rise to the top:

Love/belonging

Esteem

Self-fulfillment/actualization

Think about these needs. Do you feel them in this order and manner?

What A Man Can Be

Maslow once wrote:

“What a man can be, he must be.”

This explains the pyramid in a nutshell: if we can achieve something greater than simply meeting our physiological needs, we will seek it out.

The hierarchy of needs may seem instinctive to the Western mind, so much so that Western managers apply this basic model to motivate their teams and incentivize success.

Self-fulfillment would then be the highest motivation, manifesting itself in power and personal career development.

However, as it turns out, this hierarchy of needs hasn’t stood the cross-cultural test.

Security, Social Needs, & Quality of Life

Let’s take a look at Greece and Japan.

Self-actualization in these countries is undercut by security needs.

According to research done within IBM World Trade Corporation:

“At the country level, higher mean stress turned out to be associated with stronger rule orientation and greater employment stability…When [the mean level of anxiety] is higher, people feel more stressed, but at the same time they try to cope with their anxiety by searching for security.”

Both Japan and Greece had high Uncertainty Avoidance Indexes, which indicate higher stress and anxiety levels.

This is why life-long job security supersedes climbing the corporate ladder or seeking out challenging work in these countries and may be another reason Japanese companies keep on workers even though they may be subpar or their positions could be made redundant.

On the other hand, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark place a lot of emphasis on quality of life, thus building a career takes a back burner to social needs.

Hofstede Disagrees

As Geert Hofstede duly notes:

“My interpretation is that this tells us more about Maslow than about the other countries’ managers. Maslow categorized and ordered his human needs according to the U.S. middle-class culture pattern in which he was embedded himself – he could not have done otherwise.”

This can be said about many studies that unintentionally (or intentionally) discount cross-cultural differences.

Cross-cultural values and norms are not much considered when identifying “human needs.”

Instead, every human is painted with one brush; the brush of whichever culture is doing the research.