Picture this. A team meeting. The project has gone well — genuinely well — and a manager does what every good management textbook says he should. He names the person who made the biggest contribution. Describes what they did. Invites the room to acknowledge it.

The team member looks at the floor. Says very little for the rest of the meeting. And for the next few weeks, something has quietly shifted.

The manager puts it down to modesty. It wasn’t modesty.

Every team has a recognition system. Most managers just never questioned whether it works the same way for everyone in the room.

The assumption sitting underneath the praise

Most recognition frameworks are built on an individualist logic: that being singled out for achievement is inherently positive, that standing out from the group is something people want, and that public visibility is a form of status worth having.

These assumptions aren’t wrong — for people who share them. In individualist working cultures, the individual is the primary unit of identity and effort. Personal achievement is something to be proud of, and having it named in front of colleagues carries genuine social reward.

But not every working culture runs on this logic. And when you’re motivating multicultural teams while assuming it does, you’re setting yourself up for one of the quieter and more consistent forms of cultural friction in international management.

In collectivist working cultures, the group is the primary unit. Individual excellence is understood as a contribution to the team — not a personal achievement to be separated from it. Being pulled out of that group and placed above it, even with the warmest intentions, can feel less like recognition and more like exposure. It disrupts the social fabric of the team, places the recognised individual in an uncomfortable position relative to their colleagues, and often produces the exact opposite of what the manager intended: withdrawal, not motivation.

Why cross-cultural feedback isn’t just a tone problem

This is where most managers stop too soon. The instinct is to adjust delivery — be less effusive, tone it down, make it feel more casual. But cross-cultural feedback at this level isn’t primarily a tone problem. It’s a structural one.

The motivation frameworks most managers are trained on — Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Herzberg’s two-factor theory — were developed in the United States and reflect American cultural values. As Adler and Gundersen note, these are not universal descriptions of how human motivation works. They’re culturally specific frameworks that function well in individualist contexts and considerably less well in collectivist ones. Applying them as though they were universal is exactly the kind of invisible assumption that generates friction without ever producing a visible incident.

This doesn’t mean that people from collectivist working cultures are less motivated. It means their motivation is structured differently. They’re often deeply committed to the group’s success, highly responsive to shared goals, and capable of sustained effort within a team that functions well together. What doesn’t motivate them — and can actively demotivate — is being separated from that group for individual recognition.

The research on cross-cultural feedback is consistent on what actually determines whether a motivation strategy works: not the technique itself, but whether it matches the values and needs of the people it’s meant to reach. Running the same recognition approach across a culturally mixed team means getting it right for some people some of the time — and quietly wrong for others, often without ever knowing which is which.

What managing across cultures actually requires

The fix here is not complicated. The problem isn’t that recognition is wrong — it’s that the format of recognition isn’t universal. Once you name that, you can start building something that works for the team you actually have.

1. Ask before you assume. In your next one-to-one, ask directly: “When you do something well, how do you prefer to have that acknowledged?” Most people have never been asked this by a manager. The answers tend to be honest and specific — and they cost nothing to act on.
2. Frame achievement as collective. Individual excellence is usually also a team achievement. “This team delivered X — and the way [name] handled Y was a big part of that” keeps the team as the primary unit while still making the contribution visible to the people who matter.
3. Move significant recognition into private channels. A direct message, a one-to-one, a written note — these let you give genuine, specific feedback without creating a public moment the recipient hasn’t consented to. For people from collectivist working cultures, this often lands far more meaningfully than public praise.
4. Watch the room when recognition lands. Visible discomfort after public praise is data. If someone goes quiet, breaks eye contact, or pulls back in the meeting that follows, it’s worth noting — and a brief private conversation is rarely awkward and usually appreciated.

None of this requires you to manage every individual differently. It requires building enough understanding of your team’s working culture that you know, broadly, what recognition means to the people in it.

Cultural friction at the motivation level is one of the quietest in international teams. It doesn’t produce conflict. It doesn’t announce itself in performance data. It shows up in the team member who stops putting their hand up, the one who delivers exactly what’s asked without ever exceeding it again, and the one who leaves at the end of the project while you’re left wondering where the energy went.

If this sounds like your team, the Leading and Managing Across Cultures workshop is built around exactly these dynamics — motivation, recognition, and cross-cultural feedback in teams that span more than one way of working. Get in touch if you’d like to talk through what that looks like in practice.