Rewards and Punishments

REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS; DO NOT BREED GREED

1. Rewards and punishments are methodologies adopted by schools, institutes & organizations to get the desired performance from individuals.

2. Tell me who does not like to be recognized for a job well done? Or if you have been a topper in your class and you were told that hence forth there would be no individual rankings and report card would just say that you have either pass or failed, would you be motivated to put in the same level of hard work that u did earlier? You would put in efforts enough to ensure that you do not fail in a subject.

3. Having said that, it definitely is not the greed that motivates you to work hard to be the best student, the best player or the best performer. Recognition in form of rewards can not be termed as the greed in you to be an achiever in life.

4. Just try imagining watching the recent football tournament without the coveted reward of receiving a solid gold trophy weighing 12 kg for the winner of the tournament and the recognition of being the world champion of the most popular game in the world for next 4 years till the next world cup. I am sure not many of us would have stayed awake late in the night to see our favorite teams play if they without the motivation to try winning the World cup.

5. Roger Fedrer and Tiger Woods have already made enough money to continue keep playing every year, if they had no craving for recognition and rewards.

6. Thus rewards and recognitions act as motivators and bring out the best out of us in whatever tasks we have in hand.

7. Here’s a story that tells how rewards can influence motivation :-

Once there was an old man living all alone, who used to enjoy his afternoon nap in his lawn. A bunch of school boys used to pass his house everyday after their school- shouting, playing and making catcalls thus disturbing the old man.

He came up with a brilliant idea to stop these kids from disturbing him. He told them...