Hr- on the Folly of Rewarding a, While Hoping for B

Reading: On the Folly of Rewarding A, while hoping for B

Central Theme:

Often reward systems focus on behaviors that are least desired for repetition. It is rather easy to state that focusing on rewarding the accomplished objectives that achieve organizational goals would solve a faulty reward system. But there are several misinterpretations that shift our focus to wrong objectives – one that primarily interests me is the over-emphasis on highly visible behaviors. For example, as stated in article it is highly difficult to objectively determine and reward the team contribution – hence we make the mistake of rewarding individual performance while enforcing team work.

Analysis:

The article clearly shows that reward systems have impact on organizational schema. Through rewards we make sure certain aspects/behaviors of employees are controlled. This is done through positive and negative rewards. As in the case of university professors since more weight-age is given to research work and the intangible teaching process is hard to measure and not highly rewarded, the article shows it is rational for professors to concentrate more on research. Here there are two main aspects observed: one – research works are more rewarded, two – intangible (hard to measure) works are not rewarded even though they are equally important.

Application:

The performance review could be output based (effectiveness) or process based (efficiency) – either way objectives of evaluation should be directed towards the organizational goals. In the book Freakanomics, author states that real-estate agents don’t care about clients benefits (marginal commission doesn’t make much difference) and they look for first profitable deal. Similarly insights on which aspects employees in an organization think are important would benefit not only on rewarding them the right way but also on focusing talent towards goals.

From my understanding of reading if there is no significant difference between...