Terry L. Mathis, founder and CEO of ProAct Safety
There is no denying that we have learned a lot about performance management from B.F. Skinner. His experiments, and the work of those who followed him, gave us an insight into how to change behavior. We started to think of behavior as having a reason or influence, and we began to understand how certain environmental and organizational factors could either encourage (reinforce) that behavior or discourage (punish) it. This thinking has impacted everything from corporate communications and organizational design to motivational strategies, such as rewards and incentives. The only initial criticism of Skinner was that many of his experiments were conducted on animals rather than humans.
New research has not so much refuted Skinner as it has begun to modify his findings. Interestingly, the first real challenges came from more philosophical sources. Without denying that Skinnerian methods work, people like Alfie Kohn questioned whether it was wise to use them to reward workers for actions we were already paying them for. There were other attacks on the grounds that using carrots and sticks was a form of manipulation and less than honest as a management strategy. Neither of these two schools of thought made a serious impact on the use of these techniques, however.
The next set of research that caught attention originated in economic circles. Although it did not even allude to behaviorism or Skinner’s work directly, it did refer to something vaguely called “common wisdom,” which can be interpreted as such. These experiments focused on how common rewards and incentives impact human performance. They found that, if the task being targeted was a simple matter of routine action, typical rewards and punishment worked as expected. However, if the task required even basic cognitive effort, the rewards often had an inverse effect. These findings are explored more fully in Dan Pink’s book, Drive.
So what does this mean for us, the managers and leaders of organizations? It means that we must re-examine our thinking about the role of human beings in our organizations and determine if we can effectively manage them with the animal science we have been using. If we are still using humans as cogs in a machine, as we were taught to do by Frederick W. Taylor during the Progressive Era, the answer may still be “Yes.” However, if we want our cogs to think, the answer is a resounding “No!”
The dichotomy may be a simple one: when we want people to perform simple (animal-like) tasks which require only compliance behaviors, we can use the traditional management tools including rewards and incentives. However, if we want people to do creative or organizational thinking to direct their tasks, we need to re-examine how to best make this happen. It is important to remember that the new discoveries don’t just suggest that traditional rewards don’t increase cognitive tasks, they actually diminish them. This is not a simple matter of being ineffective. These approaches are highly detrimental!
