This weekend, a blog named” Reward Your Best Teams, Not Just Star Players” triggered my keen interest. The author emphasizes that” for every executive utterance praising a high-impact individual, there should be an equally emphatic expression of support for a high-achieving team. “1
Personally, I concur with the author`s statement. There is one time when several girls and I put off the job by hand to help one of our friend to rehearse her play. Though we injected great enthusiasm to this play, we only won the best director award. The feeling that your devotion can`t be acknowledged sucks.
A paragraph in Chapter 5 of textbook support my idea. It says that “incentive pay, especially when it is awarded to individuals, can have a negative effect on group cohesiveness and productivity, and in some cases it may not offer significant benefits to a company”. 2
However, I doubt that word “equally” in this statement. As far as I am concerned, we can`t use group-based incentives and individual-based incentives separately or equally. Since these two systems have their own standard, we should combine them to form multiple incentive plan, depending on the task itself. In my point of view, incentive plan includes two level. First, evaluate the overall performance of the team. The executive could set a goal for the team, when team achieve this goal, they could get the corresponding reward. For the excess achievement, the bonus should split among team members. For the second level of distribution, I am inclined to separate the prize into two parts. One is to be divided equally between members, the other is be determined based on the evaluation of individual’s contribution to the team. In this way, people could balance the importance of the collaboration and competition.
In conclusion, only when the reward could be separated scientifically between team members, could the team attains real effectiveness.
Reference
- Reward Your Best Teams, Not Just Star Players. (2015, June 30). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2015/06/reward-your-best-teams-not-just-star-players
- Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 177