Then I'd like you to come up with you own example of team production with gift exchange, if you can, and try to determine which elements from these readings penetrates your example.
I find these articles very interesting, and particularly the third one, because I can connect my own experience with it.
The Altruism article argued that expecting people to be selfish triggers people’s economic motivation, restrains people’s moral motivation and crushes people’s tendency to be good. I’ve read similar findings in Psychology before called the “over-justification effect”. It states that external incentive such as money or rewards will decrease a person’s intrinsic motivation on a certain task or interest. For example, if a child has a strong interest in drawing, rewarding him/her candies every time he/she draw a picture will actually decrease his/her interest and intrinsic motivation in drawing.
I think these theories indicate that external tangible rewards, including financial and material rewards, counterintuitively, may not be that effective in motivating people to perform well. Thinking about my internship experience in Dow Chemical, I found that they managed this very well and made use of these theories in their workplace very successfully. I didn’t really realize this until I read about this blog prompt and thought about what I saw at Dow carefully, and then I started to tie everything together.
As I mentioned in my previous posts, Dow promotes the “appreciation culture” among their employees. Human Resources launch campaigns to promote “appreciation culture”, and encourages their employees to acknowledge each other, appreciate each other, help each other, and collaborate with each other. They designed simple activities to promote preferred behaviors. During the “appreciation week”, they provided well-designed thank you cards and encouraged their employees to write words of thanks to their colleagues, and also helped to deliver these cards to the designated receiver. These thank you cards make employees feel being appreciated and being valued, therefore triggers their moral motivation to be a good worker, just as what the NY Times article wrote “following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation”, which ultimately increases employee performance level in a very subtle way. It’s very effective in increasing employee satisfaction, which leads to higher motivation and performance, meanwhile being cost-effective.
Furthermore, Dow shows care for their employees, which again induces their employees to see their work through a moral lens. This is reflected everywhere: flexible working hours; home office policies that allowing employees work from home once each week; free shuttle bus; employee benefits, including free fitness facilities in the office building, free medical service, and free counseling service, showing their care for employee health; and even simple things as ergonomic furniture and adjustable tables. These forms a moral implicit contract between Dow and their employees. Dow as an employer provides all these benefits with an incentive to reward their employees in a way different than directly using money, and expects their employees are motivated to provide better performance. From the employee’s perspective, receiving all these benefits will trigger their moral motivation, and will feel more obligated to give back by working harder. If all these benefits are transformed into financial awards, it might be much less effective than it is now. I think this is an exact example of organization production with gift exchange, and the valuables here exchanged are labor and rewards.
However, I do have a remaining confusion here. It seems that this theory in the Altruism article, and also the “over-justification effect”, are inconsistent with the performance pay model we talked in class. If people are payed based on performance, then in the Altruism article’s perspective, it is making the person to see his/her work through an economic lens, leading them to act selfishly, rather than acting altruistically for the organization. From the psychology perspective, rewards for sure can control and promote people’s behavior, but rewards have a long-term negative effect of undermining people’s taking responsibility for motivating themselves (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999). Thus, for the long term benefit of an organization, instead of pure extrinsic rewards and performance pay, I think it would be wise to adopt strategies to promote intrinsic motivation, which motivate preferred behaviors, and ameliorates detachment and disengagement problems.
Reference:
1. Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological bulletin, 125(6), 627.
2. Gagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self‐determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational behavior, 26(4), 331-362.
Let me take on your last paragraph first. One of the big deal issues for us is whether the entire scope of the job can be defined by variables that are observable, if not verifiable. Pay for performance works better in that instance, since both the reward structure and the performance are "objective" and then everyone can agree about who has done a good job (and who has not). Pay for performance works not nearly as well when the tasks that need to get done are only defined in the process of doing the work (which has some novelty and is not a repeat of what was done the last time). In this case, which is what Herbert Simon talked about in his Nobel lecture about Labor as a buffer, good employees often task themselves by what is necessary to do at the time.
ReplyDeleteAppreciation for effort is necessary. The appreciation need not be monetary, in total or even in part. But the pay must be adequate. You can't get a culture of work where there is real gift exchange if the employees feel the employer is being cheap pay-wise.
The last part to note here is that the Dow is a long standing company and its culture has been formed over a long time. I expect them to be around for quite some time to come. So the policies they have in place seem to be aimed at that.
You might enjoy a blog post I wrote several years ago on this topic, which looks at the economic part of the incentive as a kind of commissioning to enter into the work. It must vanish after that to let the intrinsic incentive come out. But that doesn't last forever, only till that particular project is done.
Thank you Prof. Arvan for your comment.
DeleteI think organizations today are all trying hard to make employee’s work verifiable, KPI are stressed to quantify work outcome and make it observable and verifiable. However, I believe it is still difficult to make everything verifiable. The way of performing tasks, projects carried out that may have a long-term impact, creative solutions, may all not be verifiable in the short term or at all. For these kind of jobs, intrinsic motivation would be important.
I agree that decent pay is important for employees to perform well and lead to real gift exchange. I think appreciation culture should be based on a good pay, and only makes a difference this way. Because when pay have reached a decent level, compensation is no longer a decisive factor, all other factors come in and affect employee’s performance and satisfaction level. These factors may include engagement, intrinsic motivation, interest, autonomy, etc.
I read the article you wrote about Daniel Pink as well as the videos included, I find them very interesting. But I didn’t really understand the argument you made. You said that the bubble cannot be preserved, that is true, and also mentioned economic considerations that affects this. But does this necessarily contradict with Pink’s idea? I would say both intrinsic motivation and eliciting participation through economic incentives are important for a job, since people are not doing it just for fun, but also making a living. But how to manage and balance intrinsic and external rewards to reach the best performance outcome, that’s difficult and complicated.
I found your description of “appreciation week” very interesting. It seems like Dow is in tune to emotional intelligence and how to make people feel appreciated and welcome. Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, sent letters to the parents of her top-level employees each year, thanking them and telling them how important their children are to her company. Going the extra mile like she did shows employees how much she really cares and appreciates their work.
ReplyDeleteEven so, I wonder if appreciation week at Dow ever felt artificial or forced.
Did you find yourself looking for things to thank people about?
Knowing that you had "appreciation week", were you more likely to help your co-workers in the weeks leading up to it?
I really like your idea of the moral implicit contract - employees feel more connected to Dow after receiving benefits such as those you listed, so they are more likely to act morally and perform better on the job.
What strategies do you suggest to promote intrinsic motivation? I think your post would have been stronger if you had brainstormed or outlined some ideas of ways to do this. Intrinsic motivation is a complex thing but I would be interested to hear your ideas on it.