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Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work

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Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work

by Alfie Kohn

Harvard Business Review
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Q U E S T I O N

When reward systems fail, don’t blame the program – look at the premise behind it.

Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work

By Alfie Kohn
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which most managers and the people who advise them believe in the redemptive power of rewards. Certainly, the vast majority of U.S. corporations use some sort of program intended to motivate employees by tying compensation to one index of performance or another. But more striking is the rarely examined belief that people will do a better job if they have been promised some sort of incentive. This assumption and the practices associated with it are pervasive, but a growing collection of evidence supports an opposfailure of any given incentive program is due less to a glitch in that program than to the inadequacy of the psychological assumptions that ground all such plans.

thinking – those who promote teamwork, participative management, continuous improvement, and the like – urge the use of rewards to institute and maintain these very reforms. What we use bribes to accomplish may have changed, but the reliance on bribes, on behaviorist doctrine, has not. Moreover, the few articles that appear to criticize incentive plans are

Temporary Compliance

Most managers too often believe in the redemptive power of rewards. ing view. According to numerous studies in laboratories, workplaces, classrooms, and other settings, rewards typically undermine the very processes they are intended to enhance. The findings suggest that the

Behaviorist theory, derived from work with laboratory animals, is indirectly responsible for such programs as piece-work pay for factory workers, stock options for top executives, special privileges accorded to Employees of the Month, and commissions

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