There is an entire industry dedicated to providing performance rewards programs and almost every organization on this planet in one way or another runs their business on the basis of providing performance rewards. Let’s make it clear here that the reward is something extra, something different than the salary that has been agreed as the current rate for the job.
Without reading “Punished for Rewards” it can be difficult to appreciate Alfie’s point, but let me give an example from the book. Alfie tells a story about a Pizza Hut sponsored plan in North America to encourage children to read. He tells us that to promote literacy, the children were promised a pizza for every book they read.
On the surface it sounds perfectly commendable until you examine the detail of what actually happened. These children, instead of being encouraged to read, now saw the books as obstacles between themselves and a pizza, and that the obstacle had to be overcome as quickly and with the least possible effort. So instead of finding joy in the act of reading, the books these children read were selected by them based on how thin they were and the size of the font so that they could qualify for their free pizzas as quickly as possible. possible.
As Alfie points out, instead of encouraging children to develop an interest in books, this program produced “fat kids who couldn’t read.” In the first five chapters of this book, Alfie Kohn flips our understanding of what is accepted as a basic tenet of our management practice. He does so with such astonishing logic that it is impossible not to understand him, and although his story is primarily in education, his background as a behaviorist means that the lessons he learned in the field of education are equally surgically relevant wherever we find a set of people who They try to make another group of people work harder. He goes on to show us in hundreds of different ways, through stories and examples, how what we assumed was a way of getting people to act actually has the complete opposite effect.
Alfie tells a brilliant story to illustrate the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the effect one has on the other, in the case of an elderly man who lived on the way home from a local school in America. The children had taken it upon themselves to stop in front of his house to shoot insults at him, knowing that he could not pursue them.
But the old man had a plan. One day he called the children and asked them if they would come back the next day to abuse him again, if he paid them a dollar each. The boys were delighted and showed up the next day to earn their dollar, spending the afternoon hurling more insults at the man. The man waited until they finished and then apologized that he could only pay them 50 cents for the same thing the next day. The kids agreed that fifty cents would be fine, so they came back the next day. Again the old man waited until they finished and then he apologized again, tomorrow he could only give 10 cents each.
At this, the children turned their noses and refused to abuse him further.
The old man had taken something that these children clearly enjoyed and by rewarding them for doing it, he completely changed the way they felt about what they were doing until they did not consider doing it unless they were paid. By rewarding them with an Extrinsic Motivator, he had robbed them of their joy, their Intrinsic Motivator. Alfie shows us how managers do the exact same thing with their workforce every time they try to influence performance by awarding rewards. But they still do it because they know of no other way to influence the performance of their workforce. This occurs as the world reels under the current crisis caused by bankers who were blinded to the long-term effects of their financial strategies by their short-term pursuit of individual rewards.
If you don’t read this book, you can continue to reward performance knowing that what you are doing is improving the performance of your workforce. If you consider reading this book, be prepared to discover that almost everything that you once thought of as good management practice is not.
