1 .Introduction

1.Introduction
Vietnam is a developing country with a large potential in economic growth due to its large pool of resource, including the human force contain a large amount of young talents. According to TradingEconomics (2017), during the last 10 year period, the average GDP growth rate of Vietnam is approximately 6% annually. For this reason, Vietnam has become a promising destination for foreign companies to expand their business into. Local Vietnamese companies are also benefited from the rich human resource that the country brings, however with foreign companies entering the Vietnam markets, this has created a war over talent recruitment between foreign and local companies. According to Anphabe (2016), apparently Vietnamese workers prefer working for a foreign companies to a local one. In a survey conducted in 2016 for 100 best places to work for in Vietnam, 7 out 10 of the top 10 of the list are foreign companies, Vietnam only had 3 representatives which are Vinamilk, Viettel and Vietcombank.

Top 10 best places to work in Vietnam (Reproduced from Anphabe 2016)
Many foreign companies gradually appearing leaves Vietnamese workers two options: whether to work for a Vietnamese company or a foreign/multinational company. This research is conducted to address this question, also a problem for Vietnamese company.

“Why do Vietnamese workers prefer working for a foreign company to a local one?”
To have a clear picture and to answer this question, sub-questions must be visualized and addressed to reveal the reasons behind. Firstly, benefits is one of the most factor that keep employees devoting for the company, so which kind of company offer their employees more benefits is the first question needs to be researched for. Secondly, along with the benefits employees received, another aspect that needs to be revealed is the opportunities, both personal and professional that employees can develop in either case. Additionally, which working environment is better for their employees and the importance of the company reputation, or image need to be addressed. For these aspects, sub-questions are raised for the purpose of the level of details and accuracy of the research.
Do foreign companies offer better benefits?
How are the working environments?
Which kind of companies provide better personal/professional opportunities?
Is company reputation important?
Significance of the study
The research aims to identify Vietnamese employees’ motivation at work and criteria regarding their choice of employers. It also analyzes some efficient methods for domestic firms to be more attractive in human resources market comparing with foreign ones.

The research’s findings will help domestic Human Resource managers to form effective action plans to approach talents and turn them into their employees.
2.Literature Review:
Recruitment and retention play an important role in sustainable success of business, (Ahmad and Schroeder, 2002). As the result, most organizations could offer the variety of preference policies, to attract great talents. Vietnamese organization is losing their competitive with foreign companies in their own labor market. Understanding worker motivations enables Vietnamese company to improve their performance in headhunt industry. According to Lindner (1998), motivation is the inner force that will compel individual to reach the personal and organization targets. Sadri and Bowen in 2011, defined motivation as the range of the psychological process that drives employees to obtain company targets. The motivation can be the inside force that propel individual to satisfy his requirements or needs, (Pardee, 1990). According to Gawel in 1997, Maslow hierarchy of needs is an effective tool which enables the company to meet employee’s requirement and become more attractive in Vietnamese labor market. Maslow defined human requirements and needs into five levels which are Physiological, Safety, Love and Belongingness, Esteem and Self-actualization, (Huitt,2004). The first level is physiological needs which are air, food, sleep or drink. After the first group is satisfied, human requires safety needs such as security and Law. Then, the third level is requirement of love and belongingness needs such as friendship and acceptance. The next level, Maslow expressed the esteem needs which are achievement or respect from other. The highest level is also the biggest motivation of human which is Self-actualization needs group. The fifth level can be only achieved when all other level of needs are satisfied. The literature review below will critically highlight the significant motivations that may affect the decision of Vietnamese worker, which are salary and reward system, opportunities, working environment and employee perception organization.

2.1. Salary and reward system:
The salary is one of the most important factors that motivate the decision of employees, and it’s generally determined by the manager, (Rynes et al, 2004). The satisfaction of salary is associated positively with inside motivation, (Stringer, Didham and Theivananthampillai, 2011). The salary should be specified regarding to employee’s performance. Paying the worthy wage will enhance company’s attractiveness in any labor market. In general, workers will firstly consider income when choosing the job. As the result, foreign companies have more advantages than the Vietnamese companies in this area due to higher pay for employees. The reward system is the organizational level of motivation, which gives talented individual opportunities for advancement, (Nohria, Groysberg and Lee, 2008). Energetic and talented employees are often interested in high competitive reward system. For example, four of five most attractive working address in technology industry are foreign companies, which are Bosch Vietnam, E.V.O.L.A.B.L.E Asia, ASUS Viet Nam, Global Cyber soft Viet Nam, (Jobstreet magazine, 2016). These companies are offering high competitive salary and reward, which attracting a lot of skilled technology engineers.

2.2. Preferential policies and Benefits:
Enterprises in all economic are responsible for paying insurance for their workers. Low income workers have higher demand on the quality of health and unemployment insurance, (Chernew, Frick and McLaughlin, 1997). High-income workers are motivated by premium insurance type. Offering great insurance for employee enables companies to gain advantages on recruitment market. Another factor that may affect worker’s decision when choosing job is vacation. This is generally being underestimated by the manager. In fact, vacation or holiday plays an important role on the spiritual life of employees. A vacation after stress time can recovery worker health and bring greater outcome of performance, (Fritz and Sonnentag, 2006).In general, the more preferential policies and benefits that company provides, the more attractive company is.

2.3. Working opportunities:
Talented and ambitious employees are generally interesting in the companies which have great opportunities such as equally promotion or advantage training. An effective promotion system can motivate employee to perform in the highest level to reach company targets, (Tien, Blackburn and Robert, 1994). Besides, equally promotion system enables company to discover new talents from different backgrounds. Promotion opportunities can be considered as a source of motivation. The training and education opportunities create positive effects on worker motivation and outcome, (Dyvik and Kuvaas, 2008). For examples, Unilever Vietnam (UV) company has the best working condition for many years because of their employee’s benefits, (edu2review magazine). In addition to worthy salary, UV staffs are received many different benefits such as travel allowances, reward based on business results, insurance and promotion opportunities. UV sends their employees to be training aboard to improve their skills and knowledge.

2.4. Working environment
Most of people spend a huge amount of their lives at work, therefore, working environment has significant impact on people’s wellbeing. A study conducted in 2012 by Robert Half International (Cited by Peters 2013) has found that work environment is the most fundamental factors leading to employee satisfaction. A bad working environment does not only affect negatively the productivity of the business, but also affect individuals, several studies has shown that poor working environment may cause long-term physical and mental health problems (Peters 2013). In order to make to workplace become attractive to employees, instead of thinking of how to motivate workers, leaders should think about preventing things that strip away employees’ motivation. The theory of workplace motivation is related to the self-determination theory’, which is developed by Deci and Gagne 2005. In spite of having some debate in terms of utility, this concept of psychological needs has been applied to organizational behavior for a long time (Salancik and Pfeffer 1977). Self-determination theory suggest that humans are inherently motivated, meaning that they have natural tendencies to master the environment and integrate new experiences into their lives (McCarthy 2012). According to self-determination, there are three “nutriments” required for healthy human functioning and motivation: autonomy, competence and relatedness, which are independent contributors for well being indices.

Figure: Self-determination theory
Competence is individual’s passion of managing a task’s consequence and their experience. Relatedness is people’s desire to interact with others and experience the mutual benefits of being part of a team. Autonomy related to “the desire to be in control of one’s own work and act in harmony with one’s integrated self”.

According to Deci and Ryan 2000, in case the surrounding environment allows these requirements to be fulfilled, employees’ intrinsic motivation will be improved, which will result in positive working outcomes of:
Maintaining behavior change
Performance effectiveness, cognitive flexibility
Job satisfaction
Positive work-related attitudes
Organizational citizenship behavior
Psychological adjustment
There is a study conducted in the United States and Bulgaria by Deci et al. (2001) has figured out a positive relationship between the degree of need satisfaction and work engagement. Hence, a good working environment can attract more employees as well as keeping them in long term.

2.5. Employer Brand
Employer brand is the image of an organization as an employer, which implies the intangible benefits that an organization can offers its employees (Berthon, Ewing and Hah 2005). The target of employer branding and the development of specific strategies is to recruiting and maintaining employees (Wilden, Gudergan and Lings, 2010). According to Highhouse et al. (1999), an organization’s image can be mentioned as potential applicant’s perceptions of general corporate image as an environment to work for. Organization branding is considered as one of the most sustainable and effective strategy for human resource recruitment. Applicants will be more attracted by organizations with a better brand image (Gatewood, Gowan, and Lautenschlager 1993) and Turban and Greening (1997) states that employees will prefer firms whose images are corresponded to their self-images. Chhabra and Shamar (2014) believes that “As important it is for organizations to look for the right candidate equally important is for the applicants to be attracted to those organizations”. There are some argument that employer branding is even more significant in modern context as it is difficult to find employees who are not only highly qualified but also loyal at the same time (Pingle and Sharma 2013). In order to measure employer attractiveness, there has been a scale developed by Berthon, Ewing ; Hah (2005) and Sivertzen, Nilsen ; Olafsen (2013), named EmpAt- Scale. The scale included five main dimensions, which are indicators for different kinds connected to the attractiveness of an organization:
Interest Value
Social Value
Economic Value
Development Value
Application Value
Figure: Employer Attractiveness (Sivertzen, Nilsen ; Olafsen 2013)
3.Methodology:
Based on all the information about the reason why Vietnamese people do not interest in working at foreign companies to Vietnamese ones, the project team has emphasized the causes of international preferences rather than local firms. For determination, project team decides to implement the Research Methodology that using both research methodology are exploratory study (Qualitative) and descriptive study (Quantitative) , in other words is mixed methodology research method.

First Step : Exploratory Research
Second Step : Descriptive Research
According to Surbhi , S (2016), the exploratory research is a study that assist researchers in providing the insights into and acknowledging of the causal problems. Exploratory research will be conducted in order to formulate a problem then identifying a clear investigation.

Because there are no study which conducted to research about the reasons why foreign companies are more attractive than local, an exploratory research propose to gain the understanding of cause, perspectives and motivations of employees. Thus, this research easily getting the direct feedbacks from workers to dive deeply into the problems for further examination.

To conduct the exploratory research, the qualitative research will proposed to capture the opinions and thoughts of employees (E. Wyse , S 2011).

Descriptive research is a study that exploring and examine a particular, group or a circumstances.

After obtaining general insights of employees, the second step will implement the descriptive research which carry out to describe the functional purpose and attributes clearly. In other words, the descriptive research’s purpose is acquiring completely and precise information for the study by careful plans (Surbhi, S 2016).

In this case, the project team will carry out descriptive research by imposing numerical data based on quantitative research.

E. Wyse , S (2011) states that he quantitative research aims to quantify the problem by using numerical datas and statistical numbers. Also, quantitative research assist the team in formulating or analysing the facts by more structured forms than qualitative method.

In this case, both the methodology methods have their own positive and negative sides. With the potential advantages, we will optimize the benefits of qualitative and quantitative research effectively. Certainly, about the unexpected limitations, we may analyze the sampling size carefully while carrying out the research to avoid the inaccurate numerical statistics. About the qualitative research, the project team only utilize qualitative research to provide subjective study and its participants s point of views. The respondents may based on their own biased believes, they may put their personal experience to participate in the research. Also, the risk of gathering information in a small group of people will make the project team hardly to evaluate and examine the problems. About the quantitative research, the main limitation of this research is that the lack of precise numerical statistics would lead to inaccurate decision making. Additionally, to research about the large sample size, there are will be very difficult to find out the final result because the respondent are not willing to provide the right information and tend to hide their actual feelings. Therefore, the solutions that mixing two methodology methods will optimize the advantages of both qualitative and quantitative research, thus, we will chose the most effective strengths of both methods and minimize the disadvantages in certain ways. For the beginning, an exploratory study will be implemented by using some research designs for obtaining the initial insights, after that, the rationales will be conducted to affirm the deeper thinking before making a conclusion for a proposal report.

3.1. Qualitative Research – Exploratory Study
In both Methodology Research Method, we choose Unilever Vietnam for a typical example of multicultural working environment.

3.1.1. Sample
Methodology
Focus Group
(Group Discussion)
In – depth Interviews
Sample Size
Group of 8 -10 employees
( mixtures of all departments in Unilever) gathering to discuss a particular product or idea. The researcher will ask several questions and allow them to freely share their feelings, opinions and responses.

One by one employee face to face with the researcher.

Sample Criteria
Focus on employers feelings, opinions and expressions ( list of common questions about cultural differences – working environment and asking each employee circlely)
Interviewing the manager of each department because they have a broad observation about their staff ( HR, Finance, Marketing v.vv)
All of the responses are evaluated to measure the feedback in small selected sample size .

3.1.2. Data collection:
In exploratory research – qualitative method, we choose focus group and in-depth interview for collecting data, both methods have strengths to exploit and easily to get direct feedback of respondents.

Focus Group
A focus group is an effective method which can assist the researcher to evaluate the response of employees while some problems in companies coming up and need to find a solution (Writing,A 2010). Focus groups also provide ideas for the development of the working environment in Vietnamese companies such as need to improve in terms of facilities or organisational concepts.

In addition, focus groups giving insights of the respondents and measuring their reaction when asking them several open up questions. Additionally, the researcher who has well preparations will always guide the participants get involved and moderate the conversation certainly, encourage the respondent engage in the discussion and feel free to contribute their new ideas to change the working environment ( PBWorks 2006) .

Researcher invite group of 8 – 10 participants in one department of Unilever Vietnam (maximum 4 departments such as finance, marketing, HR and legislation) to discuss about one or two problems about Vietnamese companies and let them sharing ideas to compare with international firms.

In- depth Interview :
After completing the focus group of several departments in Unilever, the researcher will invite the the head of these departments for face to face interview because they have enough experiences and a broad observation about their staffs. The face – to – face interview allows both researcher and respondent concentrate on the conversation to discuss about common problems which coming up in working place.

The advantage of in- depth interview is the flexibility for participant to make them comfortable and easily to expose their insightful feedbacks ( Steber, C 2017)
The researcher has more chances to ask follow up question and adding more details in the key question so on, allowing the respondent contribute more about the attitude, actions and expressions in particular situation.
3.1.3. Data analysis
Both focus group and in- depth interview data analytical method have only one moderator who can control everything in the conversation, they monitoring the tone and voice of all respondents to help them feel free to respond and react their feelings. By the professional techniques, the researchers will gain a deeper understanding of the employees throughout their facial expressions and body language. With the well- selected of sample size, focus group and in- depth interview have more strengths to compare with other data analysis methods because researcher just need several or particular participant which assist them concentrate almost on the conversation, support them to apprehend the insightfulness and obtain respondent’s reaction quickly and effectively.

3.2. Quantitative Research Method – Descriptive Study
3.2.1. Sample
Methodology
Questionnaire Surveys
After collecting initial insights and general information from exploratory study – qualitative research, the rationales ( questionnaire surveys) will be formed to confirm the variables for further analysis( McLeod, S 2014)
Sample Size
200 employees in Unilever who have been worked and experienced more than 2 years in four departments ( finance, marketing, HR and legislation), 50 respondents each.

Sample Criteria
Common 36 questions about difference of culture , working environment, problem solutions) with utilizing both open and closed questions for gathering data.

3.2.2. Data collection :
Questionnaires survey is a one kind of written interview which can be carried out by face to face interview, via telephone or email etc.

Questionnaires benefits are less cost, faster and more effective by acquiring information from large sample sizes.

The researcher can collect data quickly because the researcher when they can send out the questionnaires for a million of people in second. Questionnaire survey is more functional and beneficial than other quantitative research method because it is useful for large organization (McLeod, S 2014)
3.2.3. Data analysis
After gathering initial insights and general information from exploratory study – qualitative research, the project team move to next step of data analysis by implementing the descriptive study – quantitative research method to measure the perceptions of knowledge, skills or behavior and perspectives. Thus , data collections quickly select by using closed questions (tick in a box). In other words, researcher can hold larger sample size of people can be which representative of selected population and then easily to generate forms to follow up. Moreover, the form of questionnaire survey is constructive, all the participant read the same ordered questions then answer by tick in a box. Questionnaire survey measures the reliability and consistency of the research, avoiding inefficient results while respondents are not willing to answers their actual attitudes or being bias when they only tick on the middle answers ( neutral).

4.Ethical issues
To assure that we have a high quality research, survey and to maintain the credibility of the researcher, possible ethical issues must be anticipated to be aware of the factors which may decrease the quality of the research. Brace (2013) proposed a number of ethical issues that should be considered during the process of conducting surveys as follows:
For the participants:
Avoid manipulating choices regarding career of participants by using marketing tools as well as opinions.

Participants should be advised of any sensitive matters which should happen.

Participants hold the right not to answer any questions that cause them inconvenience.

Participants should be informed of any costs or disadvantage in any ways that may be resulted from participating in the survey.

Inform participants of details of the survey such as purpose, scope, length, time, methods etc.

The questions should not be abusive, misleading, anticipating to the respondents.

Respondents’ personal details must not be publicly enclosed or respondents will be informed of what is.

Possibility of rewards (gifts, certificates etc.) may be included of completing the survey as a compensation for the respondent’s time.

For the customer:
Conduct a high quality questionnaire that is truly helpful in extracting good information for client’s decision making process.

The results of this survey should not be used for other customers.

For the purpose of cost and time minimization for the customer, the survey should be effective and efficient.

The customer is entitled to evaluate the quality of the survey.

IMPLICATIONS
The research is significant for Human Resource professionals that they should focus on the needs of employees and provide them a clear picture about the organization. In case the reality is different from the brand image, employees will not commit in long term with the firm, leading to the increase in turnover rate whereas the job satisfaction reduces.
5.Limitations
There will be several limitations in the process of conducting the survey, as they happen we need to come up with methods that keep the survey in extracting sufficient and efficient information. Firstly as some quantitative methods bring in a large number of information, the scale of the method is rather broad which could results in some survey without the interviewer. As a result there will be no explanation if some of the questions are unclear, therefore questions need to be unambiguously expressed. Secondly, long questions for a complicated topic with many suggesting sub-questions should be broken to multiple clear short question to avoid misunderstanding of the idea, otherwise as Brace (2013) suggested participants would only read a dozen of first words of the question and give answers that may not be the point of what they were asked. Lastly, participants tend to drop out in the middle of the survey if the online survey is found to be too long (Cape et. al as cited in Brace 2013). This will result in a loss of data. Therefore online survey should be as appropriate length such as the completion time should not exceed 20 minutes, and the survey should be diversified in the ways of extracting information (question type), this should gain participants’ concentration level.

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https://www.jobstreet.vn/career-resources/top-cong-ty-it-mong-muon-nhat-viet-nam-phan-1/#.WaAL0Fqg_cc

APPENDIX :
Sample of Questionnaire
Fixed Response (Quantitative)
Yes-No
Multiple Choice
Rating scale/Continuum (such as Likert-type scale)
Rank ordering
(Each of these question types will be explained in detail in the next Best Practices Article.)
Fixed response questions are quick to answer and eSurveysPro graphs them automatically, which facilitates analyzing the results.

Occasionally, however, fixed response questions may draw misleading conclusions because the respondent cannot qualify responses, e.g. “Yes, but.” or “It depends” where only Yes/No are given as options.

Narrative Response (Qualitative)
Narrative responses allow respondents greater freedom of expression. There is no bias due to limited response ranges and the respondents can qualify their answers. On the other hand, these responses are time consuming to code and the researcher may misinterpret (and therefore misclassify) a response.