-----Original Message-----
From: Complexity and Management Mailing List On Behalf Of Ted Lumley
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 1997 12:07 PM
To: COMPLEX-M@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM
Subject: Re: Compensation as Information
At 08:59 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Marie Nelson wrote:
>Tom Wrote:
>> In hearing me describe a somewhat elaborate--but extremely
>> effective--commission-sharing system at a Hollywood talent agency I had
>> written about, Mike noted that the payments to the participants appeared to
>> serve principally as an information system--in other words a feedback
>> method
>> that reinforced the particular behavior the organization sought.
>
>I don't know if you are aware of the (very reader-friendly) synthesis of
>research from business and education on rewards and punishments, including
>incentive plans, grades, etc., done by Alfie Kohn, a former editor at
>Psychology Today who now supports himself writing and lecturing on
>counter-intutive findings in psychology. In his book _Punished by
>Rewards_, he pulls together a huge amount of research the bulk of which
>suggests that rewards of any kind function like punishments in that they
>basically alienate the worker/learner from the activity itself, and any
>pleasure derived from it, by making them work only for the reward (money,
>grade, praise, etc.) and undemining the quality of the product or learning
>that is desired.
>
>In learning, my field, we're all too familiar with (in others and
>ourselves) the habit of students of cramming before only to dump what
>they've learned on the exam and forget, for all p;ractical purposes, that
>they evern learned it.
>
>Kohn's work has forced me to reexamine many of my beliefs and assumptions,
>and I suspsect it might be relevant to the situation you describe.
>
>Marie
Another book which speaks to the problem of rewards and would appear to
reinforce Kohn's proposition is David Bohm's 'Thought as a System'.
Professor Bohm spent his life trying to reconcile the messages of the 'New
Sciences' with our culturally-evolved ways of conceiving of reality (e.g. in
'Wholeness and the Implicate Order', 'The Undivided Universe'), thus his
ideas on thought processes are grounded in the tenets of quantum mechanics
and complexity.
Bohm says, in the domain of rewards; 'Anything positive is implicitly
negative and vice versa.', ..... 'The sense of fear will turn into the sense
of security'. All of which can lead to 'incoherent' thought. For example,
a worker accepting a reward for 'doing a good job' may at the same time
resent the fact that he is being taken advantage of by the company in some
way (e.g. he has no voice in decisions or etc.). The incoherence comes from
the fact that it is not his intention to be taken advantage of, but,
unconsciously, he enjoys the flattery of being rewarded for doing a good
job. Thus, if he accepts the rewards, he must accept the unwanted stuff
which comes bundled with it. In effect, he is being (and I'm not sure if
this is in synch with Kohn's inference), 'punished by rewards'.
In this case, the monetary value of the reward is incidental. The act of
recognition itself leads to incoherency. However, if the flow of one's
endorphins is proportional to the size of the pay packet, this incoherency
(and associated resentment) could be even more intense.
ted lumley
E. M. (Ted) Lumley Making Sense Out of C o m p l e x i t y
emlumley@onramp.net URL: http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley
Good$hare International Tel. (817) 421-0262 Fax (817) 488-1885
--"Mike Jay" <Quarterback@msn.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>