A professional association had an incentive program to reward members for signing up new members. In order to get "credit" for the referral, an existing member would have to be specifically named on a new member's application.
Several energetic members took it upon themselves to create a series of interesting and informative events that drew many new members into the association. They worked as a team behind the scenes to create these events, so none ended up named on new applications, and none got credits for referrals. As a team effort, it would have been impossible to identify a specific, single member which should have gotten the credit for any one new application anyway.
The idea of the reward program was to create incentive, to create motivation. But for these people, the reward program actually served as a demotivator, a disincentive, a source of discontent and potential conflict. They saw that even though they did more than any others to help the association grow, others would be rewarded and they would not. They saw that, in order to succeed in their team effort, they could not seek to get their individual names on new members' applications; it would not be fair if one team member were rewarded and the others were not. So, in order to excel at the task, these people had to nobly set aside the incentive program. They had to consciously ignore it, actively work against it, in order to let cooperation grow within their team to create success.
Incentives damage internal motivation. Incentives damage teamwork. Incentives are a poor, desperate substitute for a truly inspiring, engaging vision.
No comments:
Post a Comment