Roxanne,
Measuring, compensation and rewarding based on metrics is often seen as
controlling. However I want to suggest that measuring and rewarding works
for another reason. People use management actions (rewards are one of
them) to decide what is important to the company and then to decide what
must be done to maximize personal gain or avoid personal grief.
In fact I believe the rewards have little to do with motivation and more
to do with simple communication. People need help in understanding what is
best for the organization. That is the way they tell. What managers act on
tells people what is important to the company. Managers act on the
measures that higher level mangers actually use.
Managers can guide actions by what they chose to measure. But it is tricky
because the resulting behavior is very often not what the well intentioned
manager had in mind. For example Sales people on commission most often
get good at manipulating the internal system to serve their customers
rather than getting god at selling. Hence maximize their personal gain.
Mangers trying to be clever with reward and compensation systems have many
opportunities to shoot themselves in the foot.. I believe it is because of
a poor understanding of human behavior and the idea that people need to be
motivated. We get squirrelly unexpected often unnoticed behavior with
most motivational systems.
For example the star salesmen on incentive are often best at manipulating
the internal systems to get service for their customers. Managers most
often think they are motivating the salesman to sell but they are actually
encouraging them to disrupt the operation to maximize their own gain.
Gene
At 09:13 AM 10/26/97, you wrote:
>Is Goldratt speaking for himself or is he expressing his view of the human
>race? Isn't this the behaviorist's view taken one step further. We don't
>even have to reward people to control their behavior, all we have to do is
>measure. Certainly there is a degree of truth in that measuring probably
>generally does influence behavior. And for people who are more outer
>directed than inner directed, the influence is surely greater. But we
>aren't all puppets controlled by the strings of MBO.
>
>Roxanne Abbas
>rabbas@comp-web.com
--Eugene Taurman <ilx@execpc.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>