More generally, Miller (1999) has argued that Western individualism cultivates a pervasive belief in the ‘‘norm of self-interest,’’ which gives greater prominence to the role of external motivational factors in the behavior of others. The implication of these Western norms is that when economic self-interest is present, observers are led to emphasize the role of extrinsic incentives in their theories of motivation, even in contexts where actors perceive themselves to be in-trinsically motivated. Even though recent research has cross-culturally documented that people consistently report money as the least salient and least satisfying of their own needs (Sheldon, Elliot, Kim, & Kasser,2001), the research reviewed here indicates that, at least among North Americans, extrinsic incentives are more prominent in peoples
perceptions of others motiva-tions than intrinsic incentives. Consequently, we hy-pothesize that North American managers will perceivetheir employees as being more extrinsically than in-trinsically motivated in contrast to their employeeswho perceive themselves as being more intrinsicallythan extrinsically motivated