Gulf Research MeetingThe following workshop tries to reach a better and more balanced understanding of the often quoted “low work motivation” or “rentier mentality” of Gulf nationals. While the academic literature shies away from these culturally sensitive topics, leaving them to “business guides,” the workshop assumes that the reasons for many motivational labour force problems are neither cultural nor religious. Instead, there are structural impediments stemming from the mixture of different business traditions and an extremely rapid and unbalanced growth process. In most cases, the results are underestimated and underutilized human resources and employees who are not encouraged to assume ownership and do not receive enough trust and responsibility. The workshop, therefore, will try to tackle the issue of low work motivation from the perspective of modern labour psychology and theories of organisational behaviour and project management, as well as the growing issues of youth unemployment and the urgent "localisation" programs that 2 various GCC countries have adopted in order to create jobs and their consequences on private sector costs and productivity. It will also underline the cultural and religious specificities of the region and their potential to achieve a better and more balanced work motivation than the West has developed during the last decades.
3 DAYS / 10 Workshops
MORE THAN 200 ACADEMIC PAPERS
Background
A lot has been published recently about the efforts of governments in the Gulf States to
nationalise their labour force. While the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Kuwait
can continue to rely on foreign workers for the near future given their small populations
of locals, the more populous Gulf States have to tackle this issue urgently and take the
issue of employment, especially private sector employment, of their nationals, seriously.
Massive investments into education, attracting companies, institutes and organizations to
the Gulf region, and policies which facilitate investments are just one side of the coin.
Central to most employment policies are quotas and prohibitions, which oblige
companies to employ more Gulf nationals but are often circumvented.
The use of market mechanisms (as in Bahrain and Oman) rather than of binding quotas
and prohibitions might be a step in the right direction. However, treating these topics
from the quantitative perspective of policy analyses and economics alone is not
sufficient. There is also the more qualitative question: what do employees expect from
their work and what role does work play in their lives? Most literature alludes to low
work motivation and low efficiency but without further developing on these topics.
Obviously, researchers shy away from making judgments about putative cultural reasons
for this – and rightly so. Abroad, Gulf nationals work as diligently as their colleagues
from other countries and integrate smoothly in work environments.
