Rebecca Steinhage, Senior Vice President, Corporate Human Resources and
Corporate Investments of Bertelsmann will share her experience.
>> So what we've seen at Bertelsmann concerning global reward management is
that a successful design strongly depends on five key factors.
The first is the organizational leadership.
So is it a decentralized or centralized led organization?
The second thing is the life cycle position of your business.
Are we talking about a startup situation?
Is it a mature or even declining business?
The third thing is about the value creation of your business.
And this is not the business model, this is really just about are you good at
integrated efficiency, are you good at innovation and truthful seeking.
The fourth factor is the maturity of the local health care systems.
So you might need to include some benefits into the reward system,
depending on the country you're going in to.
And the fifth is very important,
it's about values of the country you're entering.
Maybe seniority or hierarchy being very mentionable,
should be reflected in the bonus being done.
>> Another example that we have seen in our research in the German pharmaceutical
industry builds on the uncertainty avoidance dimension.
Which differentiates between risk averse and risk taking cultures.
Risk averse cultures managers from countries such as Japan or
Germany are not prepared to accept high income variability, but favor fixed pay.
On the contrary in risk taking societies such as the USA.
Variable pay and even high amounts of bonuses are well appreciated and
even expected.
The German pharmaceutical company we analyzed had to adapt the amount
of variable pay granted to its employees in various countries.
If you would like to read more, we refer you to our paper
summarizing this point in the further readings and resources.
As the last example, indicating the impact of culture rewards,
I would like to mention seniority based pay.
Seniority based pay means that the more senior a person, the higher the salary.
This can be related to both uncertainty avoidance and also to power distance.
While we can find a high correlation between age and compensation and
benefits all over the world.
This relationship is even stronger in countries where these cultural
dimensions score high such as in Japan, in Greece, or in Portugal.