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>"At a Midwestern manufacturing company, for example, an incentive system that had been in place for years was removed at the request of the welders' union. Now
by jacoblyles 17y ago
>"At a Midwestern manufacturing company, for example, an incentive system that had been in place for years was removed at the request of the welders' union. Now, if a financial incentive motivates people, its absence should drive down production. And that is exactly what happened -- at first. But after the initial slump, the welders' production rose and eventually reached a level as high as or higher than before. "
This example in particular cannot be used to support the author's hypothesis. Someone arguing the contrary point of view could opine that the removal of the incentive structure did cause a dip in productivity but the plant was in middle of a long-term rising productivity trend. There is simply not enough data to confirm or deny this.
Poor math skills and a lack of even-handed skepticism abound in opinion writing.
- Alex3917 17y ago"There is simply not enough data to confirm or deny this." Are you kidding? This is one of the most studied topics in all of science. There have been literally thousands of studies on this.
- DannoHung 17y agoYou should clarify what you mean, and I think what you mean is behavioral analysis of performance based on differing reward schedules. As I understand it, and this is fairly amoral, mind you, the best reward schedule to encourage productivity is to inform subjects that they will be rewarded for certain activities and then just reward them after a random number of actions (not time). Slot machines are the classic example, but I believe you could extend it to much more exhausting tasks such as rare loot drops in MMORPGs and, ostensibly, work tasks.
- TheSOB88 17y agoNah, man, not when you want people to want to do the work. That's the point of the article - people want loot, not killing the same monster over and over. Likewise, if you give people rewards, they'll want the reward, but they won't produce quality work because they're just focusing on getting to the goal.
- khafra 17y agoSounds like a very Buddhist perspective on motivation--mindfulness, awareness of the present, and all that. How do Buddhist companies generally compare to traditional capitalist companies? Which strategy prevails in, say, Japan or China?
- jacoblyles 17y agoI'm pretty sure my original comment made clear that I was criticizing the particular example given by the author. The author's argument, at least up to that point, rests on a foundation of bullshit. After that point, maybe the argument grew stronger. But I don't know because I stopped reading.