If rewards do influence motivation, regardless of whether we can predict
the outcome, then we must be very careful about designing rewards,
especially because the outcome is so difficult to predict. Accordingly,
reward design becomes an important item in management education. In
contrast it seems to me that most management courses emphasize strategy and
planning and goal setting and budgeting far more than reward design.
Schein's Ladder of Inference model, popularized by Senge, is one
explanation of how reward gets processed into motivation. This process in
influenced by Personality or Learning Style, Attitude, Goals, Rewards,
Threats and myriad other factors. All get mixed in this cauldron and a
response emerges.
At the risk of sounding like a behaviorist the systems principle, POSIWID,
The Purpose of a System Is What It Does, seems very useful here. A
manager must understand the POSIWID of each member in his/her portfolio in
order to confidently close the loop. If the loop is not closed, growth
does not occur. If it is closed with the wrong [algebraic] sign then
negative growth occurs. Closing the loop right is a high leverage action
of a manager.
It is a fundamental role of a manager to know "where the employee is" in
order to know how to move them to the better nexus of their needs and the
company needs.
If there are not clear, stable answers regarding how to close the loop then
the better strategy is to equip managers with the ability to do research
*in situ* Here, the manager should posit a model of the influences on each
employee's Ladder of Inference and learn through interactive experiments
what works best and what form of the model is most appropriate for next
time.
What? You mean we have to communicate about ourselves as well as our
customers?
On Sat, 27 Mar 1999 Larry Pate wrote Re: Pate's Distinctions
[...]
I will comment on "what happens to motives when
>the loop is closed from rewards," as you asked. It seems to me that there
>are three possibile outcomes: (1) a motive may be strengthened, (2) a
>motive may be weakened, and/or (3) a motive may remain unchanged. But there
>are so many factors (such as the strength of the motive, the strength of the
>reward, individual differences, short-run vs. long-run time factors, etc.)
>that it is nearly impossible to say which outcome will result from any
>particular reward for a particular individual.