Assignment task:
Bonuses Can Backfire
It might seem obvious that people will be motivated by bonuses, but many scholars question this premise. Alfie Kohn has long suggested that workers are punished by rewards and urges that organization avoid tying rewards to performance because of the negative consequences that can result. As an alternative to reward, some expert suggest that managers foster a positive upbeat work environment in hopes that enthusiasm will translate into motivation.
Although rewards can be motivating, they can reduce employees intrinsic interest in the task they are doing. Along these lines Mark Lepper of Stanford University, found that children rewarded for drawing with felt-tip pens no longer wished to use the pen at all when the rewards were removed, whereas children who were not rewarded for using pens were eager to use them. Similar experiment in which children completed puzzles have also shown that increasing rewards can decrease interest in rewarded tasks. Some have questioned the extent to which these results generalize to working adults, but concern about reward diminishing intrinsic motivation persists.
Rewards can also lead to misbehaviour by workers. Psychologist Edwards Deci notes, "Once you start making people rewards dependent on outcome rather than behaviour, the evidence is that people will take the shortest route to those outcomes". Consider factory workers paid purely on the number of units they produce. Because only quantity is rewarded the worker may neglect quality. Executives rewarded strictly on quarterly stock price will tend to ignore long term profitability and survival of the firm; they may even engage in illegal or unethical behaviour to increase their compensation. A review of research on pay-for performance in medicine, found that doctors who were rewarded for treatment outcomes, were reluctant to take on the most serious cases where success was less likely.
Although there may be some problems in providing incentives, the great majority of work cited in this and previous chapter shows that individual given rewards for behaviour, will be likely to engaged in rewarded behaviours. It also unlikely that individuals engaged in very boring repetitive task, will lose their intrinsic motivation if the task is rewarded, because they never had any intrinsic motivation to begin with. The real issue for managers is finding an appropriate way to reward behaviour so desired behaviour is increased and less desired behaviours are reduced.
Robbins & Judge 2013. Organizational Behaviour.
Answer the following:
Q1. Do you think that as managers you would use bonuses regularly why or why not?
Q2. Can you think of a time in your own life when being rewarded and evaluated on a specific goal lead you to engage in negative and unproductive behaviour?
Q3. Do you think that providing group bonuses instead of individual bonuses would be more effective or less effective? Why or why not?
Q4. List 4 ways in which you would design a bonus/reward programme to avoid problems mentioned in this case.