In today’s world modern companies try to create environments where cooperation is a must between employees and departments. Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished by Rewards, goes further and states: “Cooperation does not just make tasks more pleasant; in many cases, it is virtually a prerequisite for quality”.
Companies start to realize that having well-functioning teams, in which knowledge, resources and skills are shared and exchanged is a safe recipe for excellence. Even if companies realize that a team work is the solution, they still have a process in place that reinforce individual work over team work. Focusing on individual rewards will give the impression that organization´s effectiveness is simply the sum of individual performance, whereas there is plenty of books, which already proved that a team is much more than the sum of individuals.
Having people fighting for their individual rewards will create an environment where collaboration will not be present.
After all, who will stop helping others when this would put my ability to get my reward in risk.
Alfie Khon tells us that this rivalry is even worse when people fight for a reward that not everyone can get. Imagine a price that is given only to the best person in a team or in a department. In this situation, you will have a bunch of people fighting with each other to get the price. Each person will perceive the other with suspicion and hostility. This is explained in details in the book No Contest from Alfie Kohn.
At this point, you might think this issue is easily solved substituting individual rewards for team rewards, however this is not that simple. Paul C. Jordan shows in his article: “Effects of an Extrinsic Reward on Intrinsic Motivation: A Field Experiment”, that shifting individual rewards to team rewards only shifts the problem to a different level within the organization. Instead of individual competition, we will have teams competition.
Another problem with moving to a collective award approach is the fact that this can be used as a manipulative strategy to control a full team. In this situation, there will be a huge peer pressure instead of an environment, in which everyone is concerned about the well-being of others. This can be studied in details in the paper of Peter Balsam and Andrew S. Bondy “The negative Side Effects of Rewards“.
So far, I only discussed relationships between peers. But there is another dimension, relationship between the person who gives the reward and the one who gets it. Bruce Posner in his article Pay for Profits refers that “the principal basis for compensation is the boss whim, the only real incentive is to stay on his good side”.
The relationship between manager/boss/mentor should be something that would allow the mentoree to grow. As already explained, when rewards and incentives are present, the relationship shifts to something else. We all were in a situation, in which we did not get the bonus that we expected and I guess we all still remember how the relationship got broken after that. I finish this blog post with a quote from Alfie Kohn´s book Punished by rewards.
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