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The overall suggestion from this brief analysis of the “rise and fall” of the Buick Bar & Grill is that a glocal lens helps us probe into — and realize more clearly perhaps — other vital nooks and crannies in work behavior systems. Personally, I do not believe that the dynamics of this particular workplace — some of which many of us will recognize — would have been quite so visible without the kind of lens that glocality provides. Delivering on that promised sense of acuity is a yardstick against which the rest of the book can now be judged.

Returning to our travel metaphor introduced at the beginning of the book, we can now say that in the face of cultural and other forms of diversity, it is by no means inevitable that people at work will position themselves at loggerheads. Changing and variable work contexts are capable of priming, arousing and reinforcing a wealth of different social identities. These identities can be positioned and re-positioned, however, within a finite number of socially constructed compass points. Those metaphorical points of reference range for example from individualistic to collectivistic, power distant to egalitarian, and global to local (also, Taylor & Yavalanavanua, 1997). To the extent that points of reference are socially shared, people at work and scholars of work can, in principle, navigate each other’s cultural landscape, and could do so, in practice, in a way that is far more generative than the existing literature on culture, at work, implies. Thus, a core mistake arguably made by cross-cultural management has been to take cultural positioning at face value, and even to feed into that process in a self-fulfilling way.

In the chapters that follow, our journey will be somewhat different. Through a vehicle of emerging research, we will explore the dynamics of cultural positioning and repositioning in some detail. In the interim, however, the key point to this chapter, and our best preparation for the journey to come, is to remember the following: Although cultural diversity and identity are complex, they are not completely unpredictable, nor are they unmanageable. On the contrary, one of the keys to managing them, both for our selves, and alongside others, is to respect their inherent glocality, and the debt this fluidity owes to culture.

This has been a very brief foray into the glocality of achievement, and how to negotiate that glocality more intelligently and sensitively than many of us do at present. The cursory nature of our foray is not an issue for concern at this stage. The main point of the chapter is simply to provide a conceptual platform, and vista, for the remainder of the book. In the chapters about to follow, and through the lens of glocality, we will be looking more closely at motivational gravity, and how to manage it, across a range of settings and contexts. That discussion begins with the context of “pay diversity,” and how this particular bastion of globalization sometimes leads to envy and jealousy, between both individuals and groups.

At a more general level, our consideration of pay-performance matrices is a reminder that pay diversity is clearly not a social evil; nor is it necessarily a precursor to double de-motivation. Various theories and processes do already exist for managing it. These range, as we saw, from selecting a better “fit” to the inequities and inequalities of a project; to realistic job previewing of the project and its relative pay levels; to using group incentives in competitive situations; to creating an expanded scale of diversity where cooperation is required; and, finally, to designing and testing multidimensional pay-performance systems, that explicitly incorporate shared team pay-scapes. This concept of developing shared landscapes for team functioning is where our discussion heads to next.

This has been a very brief foray into the glocality of achievement, and how to negotiate that glocality more intelligently and sensitively than many of us do at present. The cursory nature of our foray is not an issue for concern at this stage. The main point of the chapter is simply to provide a conceptual platform, and vista, for the remainder of the book. In the chapters about to follow, and through the lens of glocality, we will be looking more closely at motivational gravity, and how to manage it, across a range of settings and contexts. That discussion begins with the context of “pay diversity,” and how this particular bastion of globalization sometimes leads to envy and jealousy, between both individuals and groups.

Our journey in this book began with a metaphor, so perhaps it is fitting to end it with one as well. Give us a hammer, so the saying goes, and the rest of the world will look like a nail. In that sense, glocality, and indeed even the escalation dynamics implied by Figure 6.5, are merely hammers for “nailing” work behavior. Just like any other theory or concept, they are stereotypes - stereotypes that have both information-managing uses and, as well, prejudice-encouraging limitations. Against these costs, it has been argued consistently throughout the book that one particular hammer - the concept of glocality and the dynamic systems which it implies - is probably less “hard” on its proverbial nails - work behaviors and the people who perform them - than its two main predecessors (globality and locality). Those predecessors, and the combined foibles that they arguably promote, have been delimited in Figure 6.5. If glocality helps to see beyond their boundaries, plus suggests new ways of overcoming them as barriers to human development, then the book will have done its work.