Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work: Summary
Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work: Summary
Abstract
In his article, Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work, Alfie Kohn puts together an indictment of the practice of incentivizing work. He argues that instead of encouraging great work, incentives inhibit it. His reasons relate to the effects incentives have on demotivating workers, punishing workers, creating a workplace of individuals rather than teams, stifling creativity, and tampering with intrinsic motivation. While behaviorists might rightly argue that the removal of incentives from the workplace will introduce some adverse consequences, Kohn posits that these consequences are largely marginal and in the longer term the removal of incentives will lead to a better workplace.
In the article Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work, the author Alfie Kohn takes issue with the assumption that rewards based systems are an efficient means of creating a lasting commitment in the worker. He believes that it is not only ineffective at this, but in most cases can in fact be detrimental. Kohn concedes that pay can impact work; the problem is that this impact is largely temporary; it shields other issues which ultimately resurface. Kohn presents a set of seven reasons why pay does not yield great work.
Kohn argues that pay is not a motivator. We take for granted that Kohn is assuming that the worker's base needs are successfully being met. To put it another way we assume that the physiological and safety needs Maslow devised in his hierarchy of needs are already covered. To make the argument that pay is not a motivator Kohn first points to the lack of research done on this question, essentially holding that the research does not yield his opposition’s conclusion. To further support his conjecture, he argues that while decreasing pay does appear to demotivate an employee, the argument is not transitive: one cannot assume that increasing pay will increase motivation.
Kohn...