(A Punishment and A Reward program )
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The Reward and Punishment Approach
Studies show that during APAR years when people are competing for promotions- they seek out easy, low-risk tasks that make them look busy. They avoid problem-solving and opportunities for creativity. As a result, people focus more on landing a promotion than on producing results.
An illustration:
To decrease the cobra population of Delhi in the 1800s, the government said it would pay an award for dead cobras.
The policy, however, led to the creation of cobra farms, where people would raise snakes then kill them, to collect the bounty !
When the government caught on and started punishments, the farmers released the snakes en masse, flooding the land with cobras – and making the initial problem even worse.
The ‘reward and punishment‘ approach to motivation is always inferior than the ‘purpose and potential‘ path described next.
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Importance of Purpose.
The way a job is designed is the most powerful.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign tasks the purpose of which they fail to understand.
Rather create a vision so that they will long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Your ship will be automatically built. A great ship that too in record time.
If the employee’s job includes a vision how he can make an impact, it will help him prioritize the work by himself. I am sure he’ll have fun in his work.
Here prioritizing isn’t just about deciding when to do something but it’s about deciding which tasks require the approval of a higher-up. It is delineating the line between authority and delegation so that the employee can decide when to try out new ideas and when to stop.
* source: Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi
Dr Ramakanta's Ideas 