Motivation is key in any organization and its needed across all areas of the organization. The more important question is how to motivate employees. Many firms do this through systems of incentive based pay either through bonuses based on performance metrics and or profit related pay. However, a recent study published in the Harvard Business Review seems to suggest that incentive based pay comes with a lot of baggage.

These motivational tools have been seen to affect motivation negatively as they can promote contentious behaviour amongst employees and increased complaints over overtime and stress. These are outcomes that no organization desires and through the study it is clear that these payment motivators are not as effective as people make out them to be. Incentive based payment methods often lead to people chasing results which only comes in useful for certain jobs, these may include sales workers. However, these schemes may not be effective in other scenarios.

I personally believe that these schemes are not the way forward towards intrinsic motivation of employees which I think should be the desired outcome of any organization. Any motivational tool solely based on extrinsic factors will lead some level of dissatisfaction because people will never be satisfied with the stuff they get. For an organization to sustain long term sustainability and motivation of its employees they need to provide employees with intrinsic motivators by giving them a purpose to look up to and to provide an environment that caters towards that purpose. Motivated employees should not give up their jobs even though they might get better extrinsic rewards elsewhere. The only way to achieve that is to obtain loyalty and trust with your employees. An example of this would be Apple, I have spoken to so many apple employees and I ask them will you move to Microsoft if I offer you better pay and perks and the answer I always get is why should I, I am perfectly happy here. The reason for this is because Apple hires employees who believe in their purpose, breaking the status quo of industries.

Therefore, I do not advocate for incentive based pay as a motivational tool as I personally think it will not lead to long term sustainability and motivation of employees as those I believe can only be achieved through intrinsic motivation tools.

Article Link: – https://hbr.org/2017/03/research-how-incentive-pay-affects-employee-engagement-satisfaction-and-trust

Picture: – From the article

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