If you want to encourage teamwork, then it might be time to ditch individual rewards, says Stephen Fortune
I recently watched author Dan Pink’s video ‘Drive’, in which he looks at the factors that drive motivation. Two things in particular struck me. First, if a task involves limited creative skill then high monetary rewards actually have a negative effect on a person’s performance while they are carrying it out. Second, that adding a reward to a task that was already intrinsically motivational will alter the person’s desire to complete it.
The areas of reward and motivation have interested me for the past 10 years and have led me to think about the conventional approach of organisational reward and how it is at odds with desirable behaviour. More often than not, businesses aim for teamwork to improve and drive performances, yet employees are praised, given bonuses and promoted as individuals.
This shift towards a desire for teamwork links to the trend for organisations to be more organic in nature, encouraging groups of people to work towards one overall goal. I see it occurring more and more, especially when it comes to new projects, but I believe that if we were to stop praising people individually for their work, we would see a significant culture change.
But why is true team culture so hard to achieve? The vast majority – 90 per cent – of teams in companies are not ‘teams’ as we would conventionally define them. Instead, they are groups of individuals attempting to be like the teams they have witnessed in events such as the Olympics – and failing.
These individuals are not motivated to act solely as a team, because they are not rewarded in the right way. A good example of this is the gold medal winning Great British women’s hockey team, who were all focused on winning their next match, because this was their sole purpose and also their reward. There is a stark difference between this kind of teamwork and the points made in Dan Pink’s video.
Why do we reward the wrong thing?
In a 1975 article by Steven Kerr, ‘The folly of rewarding A while hoping for B’, he highlighted several theories as to why the behaviour that we reward is not always the same as what we want.
His findings included: there is a significant emphasis on measuring purely visible and tangible behaviours such as sales targets and results rather than creativity; organisations focus on setting simplistic standards such as attendance at work or number of calls made, rather than more complex behaviours; and we frequently reward equality and morality over efficiency. For example, if an individual wasn’t rewarded last year, they are more likely to be rewarded this year.
So what can we do? While there is nothing set in stone, a change in reward systems will bring with it a new mindset that values teamwork rather than individual effort. The first step is examining the ideal behaviours that are not necessarily easily measurable.
When deciding what rewards to use, it is important to think about what teams value. But why are companies afraid of this change? Kerr suggests that the people who decide what rewards to give are also benefitting, and they know it would be harder for them to obtain the awards – so they are unwilling to make such changes. A second, less egocentric, reason is that a cultural shift is needed and organisations may have a fear of demotivating employees during this shift.
It has been suggested by some global companies that rewards are removed altogether to promote a ‘team-centric’ approach. It will be interesting to see if and when this method is implemented – and who will start jumping ahead of the pack.
Stephen Fortune is principal consultant at The Oxford Group