Is Punishment Or Reward The More Powerful In Motivating Employees?
Motivation plays an important part in performance. Both punishment and reward motivate in a different way. Punishment will hurt relationship of management and workers. It motivates by withholding the rewards and forcing them to meet goals in the short run. Punishment creates fear in people. It can be in the form of demotion, job loss or public humiliation. It is not encouraged by many thinkers, as there might be negative effects in the long run. People might become defensive and work quality might drop. Union might also get involved. The stress might increase staff turnover rate and thus increase company’s costs in re-training and recruitment. However, it is also an effective corrective action to stop bad working behaviour.
Rewards can be in the form of money, promotion, job satisfaction and other types of recognition. However, rewards lose their effectiveness as motivators over time. Awarded worker might become complacent. If worker perceived as less deserving also received the award, other recipients will treat the same reward as an entitlement.
The below-mentioned three thinkers belong to the human relations era. They emphasize the importance of understanding human behaviour and motivation.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identified five levels of human needs which workers seek to fulfill. In sequence of bottom-up, they are the physiological needs (Food, water, shelter, sleep and medicine), security or safety needs (Fear of job loss, free of physical danger), social needs (sense of belonging), esteem needs (Power, status and self-confidence) and self-actualization needs (Self-fufillment).
All of the needs are structured into a hierarchy and once the lower-level needs have been fully met, the worker would only be motivated by the opportunity of satisfying the next need up in the hierarchy. A business should therefore offer different incentives as reward to workers in order to help them fulfill...
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