Motivating Employees

When reading “hope beyond the budgeting model” I felt that there was a redundancy in asserting the theory that goals should not be set because they only provide employees with the motivation to do the bare minimum to reach the set objective. The main focus in the article was to try to reward goals based upon performance compared to others within the company (yet still trying to advocate teamwork) and to competitors. An example would be basing the rewards package upon how much an employee’s success helped influence the company’s success in beating the benchmark they had against other competitors as well as against the previous year’s performance. It advocated the idea that if goals are set and used as the primary system for rewarding methods then two things will occur: (1) the employee realizes they cannot achieve the goal if it is too high and will decrease their performance due to the feeling of inadequacy in performance needed to reach the goal and receive the rewards, (2) the other side of the scale is that once they have reached the goal there is no incentive to work harder because there is no further compensation for doing so. Some of the other focuses on motivation were described in the Handelsbanken model of rewards. This banking company from Sweden concentrated on ideas such as aligning rewards with strategic goals, use clear transparent measurements, reward performance of teams, as well as a few others. Their argument is that if employees don’t focus on a set accomplishment line then they can worry less about achieving what they must to meet that line and focus primarily on team work, performance, and contributing to company success and as a result will reap the benefits in the end. Further arguments supporting this model...

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...e employees. Some saw a shortcut to achieving the most sales by placing their associate number on sales that were not theirs. Others would return merchandise under another co-worker’s ID number and resell it with their number on it. The lines of actuality in determining who really sold what became so blurred and misconfigured that the whole contest was in all reality an influence for unethical decision making in the anticipations of receiving rewards. Conclusively, the folly means that sometimes moral lines are crossed if the opportunity is seen to reach the desired outcome in a way that may work but is not how the organization wishes it to be accomplished. A method to combat this critical flaw in rewarding individuals for achieving a set goal is to place more focus on the methods and behavior used to achieve the outcome rather than solely just on the end result.