8
Change Their Economy

STRUCTURAL MOTIVATION

I can take any amount of criticism, so long as it is unqualified praise.

Attributed to Noel Coward

Image

So far we’ve explored both personal and social influence. Now we step away from human factors and examine how to optimize the power of things such as rewards, perks, bonuses, salaries, and the occasional boot in the rear. Most leaders need no convincing to align rewards with vital behaviors. They fully believe that incentives change behavior. So our advice here may surprise you.

Your goal with structural motivation and using incentives should not be to overwhelm people to change. Rather, it should be primarily to remove disincentives—to “change the economy” as it were. As we’ll see, most leaders run the risk of relying too much on incentives rather than too little. If bad behavior is deeply entrenched, odds are that the current economic system people live in is positively encouraging what you don’t want. Changing the economy means simply to ensure that positive and negative incentives aren’t undermining the influence message you’re trying to send. The real work of change must be done by sources 1 (personal motivation) and 3 (social motivation).

USE EXTRINSIC REWARDS THIRD

We’re about to step on dangerous ground. Stories of well-intended rewards that inadvertently backfire are legion. The primary cause of most of these debacles is that individuals attempt to influence behaviors by using rewards as their first motivational strategy. In a well-balanced change effort, rewards come third. Influencers first ensure that vital behaviors connect to intrinsic satisfaction. Next, they line up social support. They double check both of these areas before they finally choose extrinsic rewards to motivate behavior. If you don’t follow this careful order, you’re likely to be disappointed.

This particular concept came to the world’s attention with a nursery school study that sent out a warning that won’t soon be forgotten. In fact, in 1973 when Dr. Mark Lepper and his colleagues examined the effects of rewarding children (giving them their favorite snack) for engaging in activities that they already enjoyed (playing with their favorite toy), change agents, coaches, parents, and leaders all took note.

Dr. Lepper revealed that rewarding people for engaging in an activity that is already satisfying may work against you. Instead of increasing the frequency of the activity, once the reward is taken away, the subjects may do less of it. At least, once the favorite treat was taken away from the Bing Nursery School kids that Lepper studied, they played with their favorite toy less often than they played with it before they were rewarded for doing so.

Think of the implications. You want your daughter to learn to love reading with the same joy and fervor you and your spouse have. You notice that she’s starting to pick up the habit on her own, so you decide to reinforce it. To encourage her, you create an incentive program. Every time she picks out a book on her own and reads it, you give her $5. She loves the plan and starts reading more, and after a while she spends her earnings on a new video game for her latest game system. In fact, it’s not long until she’s able to buy several games, for which she thanks you profusely.

After a while you think that you’ve rewarded reading enough and that the pure pleasure of soaking in the words of some of the world’s best authors has become its own reward. So you pull away the incentive. Surely your encouragement has helped your daughter learn to love reading good books even more. Most certainly she’ll now snuggle up with her favorite author’s latest work without any encouragement from you.

But your plan backfires. The minute you stop paying your daughter for reading, she turns to her video game system and reads less than she did before you started the incentive program. Apparently she has learned to earn money to purchase video games, and the incentive you tried didn’t leave the impression you wanted. She’s just like those nursery school kids. Where did you and Dr. Lepper go wrong?

The explanation for this phenomenon, known as “the over-justification hypothesis,” suggests that if people receive rewards for doing something they initially enjoy, they conclude the same thing an outsider watching them in action might conclude. When thinking about what’s happening, humans recognize that they’re doing something and getting paid a special bonus for doing it. They conclude that since they’re being rewarded for the task, it must not be all that satisfying (why else would someone offer a reward?), and therefore they’re doing it for the bonus. And now for the dangerous part. Once the reward is removed, the person believes that the activity isn’t as much fun as he or she judged earlier, so he or she does it less often.

Generally people are perfectly happy getting rewarded for something they already enjoy. For example, imagine that you absolutely love playing the harp (a hobby you picked up in your forties) and your next-door neighbor asks you to play at his son’s wedding reception—for a nice fee. You love playing, you love the attention, and you are really psyched about getting paid for doing something you already love doing. You can’t believe your luck. For you, getting paid to do what you love doing doesn’t diminish your affection one tiny bit.

Sometimes, however, making use of extrinsic rewards can be complicated. As Dr. Lepper learned, not every reward has its desired effect. Sometimes extrinsic programs can completely backfire and serve as a punishment. For example, a company’s employee-of-the-month program is supposed to give special attention to people who have done something, well, special. They’re singled out at an all-hands meeting and are given a plaque.

Comedian Demetri Martin summed up the way a lot of employees feel about such programs when he said, “I think employee-of-the-month is a good example of when a person can be a winner and a loser at the same time.”

To many employees, being singled out in front of and compared to peers might not be all that rewarding. It could be just the equivalent of saying, “Congratulations! Here’s a hundred dollars, a beautiful plaque with your name engraved on it—and four weeks of unrelenting ridicule from your coworkers!”

Organizational scholars have long found that many employees leave corporate award ceremonies not motivated and excited as intended but with exactly the opposite reaction. They exit demotivated and upset because they themselves weren’t honored. In fact, many see the whole ceremony as a sham. Interviews reveal that typically half of those who attend corporate awards programs believe that they were far better qualified than the person who was honored but that they didn’t get picked for political reasons.

And it’s not just token awards that can go amiss. You could fill volumes with stories of how carefully considered incentive schemes have run amok. One hospital, for example, found that anesthesiologists who were paid based on personal production were less willing to jump in and help one another when someone else’s patient was reacting badly.

Consider a couple of the former Soviet Union’s attempts to dabble in incentive schemes. In the energy sector, rubles were literally being thrown away in the search for oil reserves because Soviet workers received bonuses according to the number of feet they drilled. It turns out that it’s far easier to drill many shallow holes than to drill a few deeper ones—which is exactly what happened. Instead of following the geological advisories to drill deep to find existing reserves, workers were happy merely poking the surface over and over—turning up very little oil. After all, it’s what they were rewarded for doing.

One woman we worked with—a manager at an internationally renowned company—decided that her employees weren’t as innovative as they needed to be, so she instituted a simple suggestion program. What could be more innocent? To encourage creativity, she asked each work group to meet for at least a half hour per week to brainstorm new work methods, solutions to longstanding problems, and possible new products. To put teeth into the new program, she put together a committee that reviewed submissions and then awarded cash prizes to employees who came up with ideas that were judged as “real moneymakers.”

Within a few months the cash-for-ideas program had completely broken down. In fact, members of one work group ended up beating up one of their own team members as a result of the program. It turns out the team came up with a really good idea, and Charlie, the aforementioned team member, promised that he’d take care of the paperwork. He then submitted the suggestion under his own name and kept the $5,000 bonus for himself. When his teammates found out about the deception, first they confronted him, then someone shoved him, then a melee broke out and Charlie ended up in the emergency room.

To avoid further injuries, the owner did away with the incentive program. Of course, she still invited suggestions, but none came in. Employees now believed that she was shorting them by asking for ideas without offering incremental pay. She had hoped to use the suggestion program to stimulate innovation, but she found that by paying people for their thoughts, she had inadvertently sent the message that making suggestions was outside a person’s normal job requirements. Now employees believed that if they came up with a good idea, they deserved to be paid a bonus. Otherwise, they were being exploited.

What’s a leader to do?

USE INCENTIVES WISELY

Remember the principle we started with. Don’t use incentives to compensate for your failure to engage personal and social motivation. Nevertheless, let’s be clear. Influencers eventually use rewards and punishments. For instance, if you don’t repay a loan to Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, your borrower group has to pay it back for you. And remember, people there know where you live! If a person in a rural African village discovers that his neighbor is hiding a Guinea worm infection, and if that person brings it to the attention of village leaders, the good citizen is given an attractive t-shirt (emblazoned with a Guinea worm disease eradication logo).

So, the question is, how do you use incentives wisely?

Take care to ensure that the rewards come soon, are gratifying, and are clearly tied to vital behaviors. When you do so, even small rewards can be used to help people overcome some of the most profound and persistent problems. For example, Johns Hopkins Hospital completed a study of alcoholics who had been admitted to the hospital to, of all things, drink alcohol—but only in moderate quantities. The idea of the project wasn’t to encourage the subjects to climb on the wagon or to go cold turkey but to learn how to drink in moderation.

To influence patients’ behavior, each day staff members determined privileges on the basis of how much alcohol the patients consumed. If they drank too much, they were given pureed food instead of the normal offering. Their amount of consumption also affected phone privileges, visiting hours, and so on. When compared to control patients who were simply told how much to drink with no incentives, experimental subjects were 60 percent more likely to reach their target consumption level.

When you first hear that a simple incentive such as phone privileges can help patients break free from something as powerful as the steel grip of alcoholism, it’s a bit hard to believe. Nevertheless, this example pales in comparison to the work of Dr. Stephen Higgins, who routinely uses vouchers to help direct the behavior of cocaine addicts. Cocaine addicts typically fail to make progress in recovery programs because they quit before the program starts to take effect. With Dr. Higgins’s voucher system, outpatients are required to submit a urine sample three times a week. If all three samples test negative, the subjects receive a bonus voucher that they can exchange for goods and services provided by the research staff.

With something as tremendously addictive as cocaine, you’d expect that a simple voucher that could be traded only for a rather small prize wouldn’t have much of an effect. In Dr. Higgins’s own words: “It surprises many people that a stack of paper can outweigh the powerful urge to use cocaine, but it makes sense in terms of what we know about why people use drugs.”

Obviously, vouchers alone wouldn’t be enough to keep cocaine addicts clean. However, when used with subjects who are already morally and socially invested in giving up cocaine, and when they’re combined with traditional methods, those who were given incentives benefited from the motivational boost. Of the patients who were given vouchers, 90 percent finished the 12-week treatment program, whereas only 65 percent of non-voucher subjects completed the program. The long-term effects were similarly impressive.

To show how small incentives can be powerful motivators for almost anyone, take a look at your luggage. If you’re like millions of other travelers around the world, you’re sporting a plastic tag that touts your status in your favorite frequent-flier program. It’s almost embarrassing to acknowledge the way these programs have reshaped our behavior.

For example, a friend of ours recently took a trip from Salt Lake City to Singapore. If you were to take out a globe and draw a route from Salt Lake to Singapore, you’d pass through places such as San Francisco and Hawaii. But neither destination appeared on our friend’s itinerary. Instead, he first flew two hours east to Minneapolis, Minnesota, before flying back west to Anchorage, Alaska, and Seoul, South Korea, on his way to Singapore.

Our friend added hours to his flight because it maximized his frequent-flier miles. This enormous inconvenience probably earned him a whopping $30 worth of benefits. But he wanted those miles. He needed those miles. In fact, flyers have become so obsessed with maximizing their miles that the dollar value of unused frequent-flier miles on the planet now exceeds all the cash circulating in the U.S. economy.

If you’re still not convinced that small rewards can affect behavior, consider the following example. In a group home for troubled teenage girls, administrators noted an alarming trend. Suicide attempts among residents had increased dramatically. After administrators tried everything from giving emotional speeches, to holding group sessions, to enlisting the help of friends and family—all to no avail—they came up with, of all things, an incentive. They came up with an incentive that could be invoked on the spot, that was immediately motivating, and that was clearly tied to the desired behavior. This wasn’t just any old incentive but one that on its face sounded crazy. Here was the incentive. If a teenage resident attempted suicide, she would be denied TV privileges for the next week. Suicide attempts dropped to zero.

Without going into the complex psychology of suicide attempts versus suicide gestures and then missing the point of the example, suffice it to say that small incentives that are immediately linked to vital behaviors can yield amazing results with some of the world’s most difficult problems.

If You’re Doing It Right, Less Is More

From the examples we’ve provided, it should be clear that when it comes to offering extrinsic rewards, the rewards typically don’t need to be very large—at least if you’ve laid the groundwork with the previous sources of motivation. Nobody’s suggesting that corporate executives should ask employees to come to work without any compensation or that children should never get paid for helping out around the house. However, when you do want to provide a supplemental reward to help shape behavior, as the much maligned adage goes, it’s often the thought, not the gift, that counts. That’s because the thought behind an incentive often carries symbolic significance and taps into a variety of social forces that carry a lot of weight, much more so than the face value of the incentive itself. So, as you think of awards, don’t be afraid to let the thought behind the award carry the burden for you.

Consider the work of Muhammad Yunus, “banker to the poor.” When Dr. Yunus began to create a financial institution to administer loans to the working poor of Bangladesh, he discovered that some of the best young bank officers (who were often required to go door to door and meet with people living in the humblest of conditions) were former revolutionaries who had once fought to overthrow the government. Many put down their guns and picked up clipboards as they learned that they were able to effect more change through administering microloans than they could ever hope to achieve through violent means.

If you’ve ever visited any of the settings where these young people have worked their magic, you can’t help but be impressed with the nobility of their work. Villagers who once lived on the edge of starvation—whose children were often born with severe handicaps resulting from the arsenic found in the unfiltered water, and who often died at a young age—now run small businesses. They also rear healthy children who, for the first time in their family’s history, attend school.

Given the enormous intrinsic and social benefits associated with their jobs, what could possibly provide additional incentive to these erstwhile revolutionaries? Earning a gold star. An executive discovered this surprising fact almost by accident. To ensure that local branches were focusing on the right goals, one of the regional managers instituted a program where branches of Dr. Yunus’s bank earned different-colored stars for achieving mission-central results—one color for hitting a certain number of loans, another for registering all the borrower’s children in school, another for hitting profit goals, and so forth.

Soon it became the goal of every manager to become a five-star branch. Individuals who were doing some of the most socially important work on the planet—and already working diligently and with focus—kicked their efforts to a new level when faced with the opportunity of earning colored stars. Of course, there was nothing of tangible value in these ten-a-penny stars, but symbolically and socially they provided more incentive than anyone had ever imagined.

Once again, if you’ve done your work with both personal and social motives, symbolic awards take on enormous value. If you haven’t, extrinsic rewards can become a source of ridicule and cynicism. Fortunately, in this case, bank employees’ deep regard for Dr. Yunus, along with their commitment to serving the poor, made gold stars more valuable than money. In fact, if Yunus had offered large cash rewards, it might have undercut the moral and social motivation that already drove these employees every day.

Hundreds of executives showed this same high-energy response to a symbolic incentive when a large consulting firm in the United States decided to offer awards for completing training assignments. The plan was simple. Senior leaders would meet weekly in a world-acclaimed training program where they would be given specific behavioral goals to ensure that they put their learnings into practice. The leaders would then report back to their trainer when they had fulfilled their commitment.

Soon leaders were going to great lengths to complete their assignments, but in addition, in the event that they were called out of town, they’d e-mail their trainer to report on their progress. Senior executives jumped through these administrative hoops because, competitive souls that they were, they all wanted to earn the top award—an inexpensive brass statuette of a goose. Once again, it wasn’t the cash value of the reward that mattered. It was the symbolic message that motivated behavior. It was the moral and social motivation that gave the token award supreme value.

Mimi Silbert, as you would guess, is a veritable master when it comes to making use of small rewards—one heaped upon another. Delancey residents quickly learn that with each new accomplishment they receive new privileges. Residents move from grunt work to increasingly complicated and interesting jobs. They move from a nine-person dorm to a five-person room, then through several more steps to the Brannon Building where they are awarded their own room. Eventually they arrive at Nirvana—an apartment of their own. Ultimately, probably at the top of the value chain, residents are given “walk-around money” (WAM)—and the privilege to use it.

Finally, when it comes to demonstrating the power of small rewards administered quickly and tied to vital behaviors, consider what happened at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center when Leon Bender, a urologist from Los Angeles, decided to pit a best practice he had observed on a cruise ship against one of the finest hospitals in the world.

Dr. Bender had noticed that each time passengers returned to the waiting cruise ship, someone squirted a shot of Purell on their hands. Crew members also distributed the disinfectant to passengers as they stood in the buffet lines. The good doctor began to wonder if it was possible that the cruise ship staff was more diligent with hand hygiene than the hospital staff he had worked with for nearly four decades.

The problems associated with poor hand hygiene, Dr. Bender realized, weren’t restricted to remote islands or developing-world shopping bazaars. The acclaimed hospital he worked at (similar to all healthcare institutions) constantly fought the battle of hospital-transmitted diseases that are a product of poor hand hygiene. A healthcare professional picks up bugs from one patient and then passes them on to another. It happens all the time. Consequently, hospitals remain one of the most dangerous places in any community, causing tens of thousands of deaths annually. Find a way to get people to wash their hands thoroughly between patients, and you’d go a long way toward eliminating hospital-transmitted diseases.

When Dr. Bender returned home, he started a hand-hygiene campaign. He quickly learned that most doctors believed that they washed often and thoroughly enough. One study even found that while 73 percent of doctors said they washed effectively, only 9 percent actually met the industry standard.

According to Paul Silka, an emergency room physician at Cedars-Sinai, doctors often believe, “Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.” Nobody believes that he or she is part of the offending majority.

To help set the record straight as well as propel doctors to wash effectively, administrators tried several techniques. First they deluged doctors with e-mails, posters, and faxes. That didn’t work. It’s likely that most physicians continued to believe that the problem was someone else’s, not theirs. In fact, nothing worked until administrators stumbled on a simple incentive scheme. Staff members met doctors in the parking lot and handed them a bottle of hand disinfectant. Then Dr. Silka assigned a group of staff members to see if they could catch doctors in the act of using the disinfectant (choosing a positive over a negative approach).

Now here’s where incentives came into play. When administrators “caught” physicians using the disinfectant, they gave them a $10 Starbucks card. That’s it. They gave a $10 coupon to the highest-paid professionals in the hospital as an enticement for not passing on deadly diseases. With this incentive alone, compliance in that particular facility moved from 65 to 80 percent.

Reward Vital Behaviors, Not Just Results

Earlier we learned that it’s best to take complex tasks and turn them into small, achievable goals. Now we’re adding another concept. Reward small improvements in behavior along the way. Don’t wait until people achieve phenomenal results. Instead, reward small improvements in behavior.

As simple as this sounds, we’re bad at it; especially at work. When polled, employees reveal that their number one complaint is that they aren’t recognized for their notable performances. Apparently people hand out praise as if it were being rationed, usually only for outstanding work. Make a small improvement, and it’s highly unlikely that anyone will say or do anything. Each year a new survey publishes the fact that employees would appreciate more praise, and each year we apparently do nothing different.

This is odd in light of the fact that humans are actually quite good at rewarding incremental achievement with their small children. A child makes a sound that approximates “mama,” and members of the immediate family screech in joy, call every single living relative with the breaking news, ask the kid to perform on cue, and then celebrate each new pronouncement with the same enthusiasm you expect they’d display had they trained a newborn to recite “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

However, this ability to see and enthusiastically reward small improvements wanes over time until one day it takes a call from the Nobel committee to raise an eyebrow. Eventually kids grow up and go to work where apparently the words good and job aren’t allowed to be used in combination, or so suggest employee surveys. There seems to be a permanent divide between researchers and scholars who heartily argue that performance is best improved by rewarding incremental improvements, and the rest of the world where people wait for a profound achievement before working up any enthusiasm.

Reward Right Results and Right Behaviors

Perhaps people are stingy with their praise because they fear that rewarding incremental improvement in performance means rewarding mediocrity or worse.

“So you’re telling me that every time a poor performer finally does something everyone else is already doing, you’re supposed to hold some kind of celebration?”

Actually, no. If employees’ current performance level is unacceptable and you can’t wait for them to come up to standard, then either terminate them or move them to a task that they can complete. On the other hand, if an individual is excelling in some areas while lagging in others, but overall his or her performance is up to meeting expectations, then set performance goals in the lagging areas, and don’t be afraid to reward small improvements. This means that you shouldn’t wait for big results but instead should reward improvement in vital behaviors along the way.

For example, while working on a change project in a massive production facility in Texas, a member of the change steering committee abruptly informed the leaders that the culture was too negative. Apparently he had read the surveys. His exact words were: “Do something right around here, and you never hear about it. But do something wrong, and it can haunt you for your entire career.”

With this in mind, the CEO asked all the leaders to keep an eye open for a notable accomplishment—something they could celebrate. For about a week nothing happened. Then one of the assembly areas set a performance record. The crew had assembled more units in one day than ever before. The CEO immediately called for a celebration.

While it seemed like a victory, the details the leaders uncovered as they researched this record revealed something quite different. It turned out that in order to set a record in production, the afternoon shift had reduced quality standards on the product. They had also focused only on producing, and not on replacing the stock they had used up, which left the morning shift with a lot of extra work. Finally, the workers had purposely underperformed the previous day in order to set themselves up to hit record numbers on the day in question.

In short, leaders were horrified to discover that they were inadvertently rewarding behaviors that ultimately hurt the company and morale. They had rewarded results without giving any thought to the behaviors that drove them.

Reward Vital Behaviors Alone

In addition to the fact that rewarding results can be unwise if you’re unable to observe people’s actions, it’s important to remember that behavior is the one thing people have under their control. Results often vary with changes in the market and other external variables. Consequently, influencers continually observe and reward behaviors that support valued processes.

For example, the book Kaizen, by Masaaki Imai, highlights the Japanese appreciation for the importance of rewarding effort and not outcome. Imai tells the intriguing story of a group of waitresses whose job it was to serve tea during lunch at one of Matsushita’s plants. The waitresses noted that the employees sat in predictable locations and drank a predictable amount of tea. Rather than put a full container at each place, they calculated the optimum amount of tea to be poured at each table, thus reducing tea-leaf consumption by half.

How much did the suggestion save? Only a small sum. Yet the group was given the company’s presidential gold medal. Other suggestions saved more money (by an astronomical amount), but the more modest proposal was given the highest recognition because it captured what the judges thought was the best implementation of Kaizen principles. They rewarded the process, knowing that if you reward the actual steps people follow, eventually results take care of themselves.

Watch for Perverse Incentives

People are so often out of touch with the message they’re sending that they inadvertently reward exactly the wrong behavior. Just watch coaches as they speak about the importance of teamwork and then celebrate individual accomplishment. Kids quickly learn that it’s the score that counts, not the assist, and it turns many of them into self-centered prima donnas.

Or consider the family whose son has a serious drug addiction. In their effort to express love and support, family members unintentionally enable his addiction. With their words they say, “You should really stop taking drugs.” But with their actions they say, “As long as you’re taking them, we’ll give you free rent, use of our cars, and bail whenever you need it.” They are, in fact, rewarding the very behavior they claim to want to change.

For years U.S. politicians have wrung their hands over the fact that Americans save so little money. For a time they looked jealously across the ocean at Japanese citizens, who save money at many times the rate of Americans. Some analysts speculated that there was just something different about Japanese character. Perhaps they were more willing to sacrifice. But then again, maybe the difference could be attributed in part to incentives. For example, in the United States interest earned on savings is taxable. For many years in Japan it wasn’t. In the United States during that same time period, interest on consumer debt, like that from credit cards and home loans, was tax deductible. In Japan it wasn’t. Maybe we were more alike than we thought.

Many organizations set up an entire reward system that, by design, motivates the wrong behavior. Dr. Steve Kerr first drew attention to this problem in his now classic piece, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” For example, some veterans and scholars were concerned about a phenomenon that had occurred in previous wars but that had increased significantly during the U.S. war in Vietnam. While still not the norm, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were more likely to avoid conflict—even “fragging” their own officers to do so—than soldiers in previous wars had been. And instead of going on search-and-destroy missions, as had their predecessors, many learned to “search and escape.” How could this happen?

Clearly soldiers in Vietnam labored under a set of conflicted emotions that had no corollary in World War II. It’s hard to imagine how U.S. soldiers in Vietnam functioned at all, knowing how hostile many of their fellow citizens were to their mission. And yet, according to Kerr, there was more going on that influenced this behavior than a fuzzy mission and a hostile citizenry.

Examine the reward structure. Both generations of soldiers wanted to go home. That was a given. Nobody liked putting his or her life at risk. The typical GI from World War II knew that in order to go home, he and his comrades had to win the war. They’d never go home until the enemy was defeated. Avoiding a mission simply put off the inevitable and might well give the enemy more time to prepare.

Contrast their circumstances to those of their own children—the Vietnam soldiers. They were allowed to go home when their tour was over, not when the war was over. And if they disobeyed orders, avoiding immediate danger, rarely did anything ever happen to them. So, rational beings that they were, they avoided danger, broke regulations, caused problems, and otherwise did their best to stay out of harm’s way. Their parents were rewarded for being heroes during World War II, while their children were rewarded for watching out for themselves during the Vietnam War.

So take heed. When behaviors are out of whack, look closely at your rewards. Who knows? Your own incentive system may be causing the problem.

PUNISHMENT SENDS A MESSAGE, AND SO DOES ITS ABSENCE—SO CHOOSE WISELY

Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of rewarding positive performance because the person you’d like to reward never actually does the right thing. In fact, he or she does only the wrong thing—and often. In these cases, if you want to make use of extrinsic reinforcers, you’re left with the prospect of punishing this person. Fortunately, since punishment is from the same family as positive reinforcement (half empty/half full), it should have a similar effect. Right?

Maybe not. Punishment far from guarantees the mirror effect of positive reinforcement. In virtually hundreds of experiments with laboratory animals and humans, punishment decreases the likelihood of a previously reinforced response, but only temporarily. Plus it can produce a whole host of other undesired effects. When you reward performance, you typically know that the reward will help propel behavior in the desired direction, but with punishment you don’t know what you’re going to get. You might gain compliance, but only over the short term. Then again the person in question may actually push back or purposely rebel. And there’s a good chance that this person is not going to appreciate you for what you’ve done, thereby putting your relationship at risk.

Actually, punishment can create all sorts of serious and harmful emotional effects, particularly if it is only loosely administered. For instance, Martin Seligman, in his book Learned Helplessness, reports that if you place a dog on a metal grid and then shock the animal—randomly electrifying one part of the grid, then another, then another—eventually the poor animal cowers in one spot and doesn’t even bother to move when the shock is randomly administered. When exposed to random pain, the unfortunate subject becomes helpless, broken, and neurotic. So take heed. When it comes to punishment, you must be very careful.

Before Punishing, Place a Shot Across the Bow

One way to make use of punishment without actually having to administer it is to “place a shot across the bow” of those you’re trying to influence. That is, provide a clear warning to let them know exactly what negative things will happen to them should they continue down their current path, but don’t actually administer discipline yet. Then if they stay clear of the wrong behavior, they enjoy the benefit of the threat without having to actually suffer its consequences. This method may sound manipulative, but before you pass too harsh a judgment, consider a novel and effective police tactic that is currently being used with drug dealers and other perpetual criminals in North Carolina and other states. Here’s how the method used by authorities makes use of warnings as opposed to merely tracking down offenders and throwing them in jail.

Traditionally, cops tried to put a dent in crime by implementing aggressive search-and-arrest strategies that focused on a targeted area. This blitz strategy tended to provoke public outrage and mobilize a community against the policing efforts, and it rarely created effects that lasted very long. As soon as the cops moved to the next area, new faces came in to fill the old positions, and the bad guys were once again in charge.

With the new strategy, authorities take a different approach. Police invite individuals whom they are about to arrest to attend an offender notification forum. The district attorney’s office promises that attendees won’t be arrested during a 90-minute meeting where authorities then make use of every source of influence imaginable.

For example, along with the offenders, authorities bring in the attendees’ friends, family, and other community opinion leaders who ask the criminals to give up their ways and seek normal employment. Next, public officials clarify existing laws and likely consequences: if you get caught, here’s the likely penalty. Following this formal approach, ex-offenders (usually former gang members and drug dealers) talk about what they’re currently doing to stay straight. Finally, heads of public agencies explain choices the offenders can make in order to avoid falling back into their old habits, including job programs and what it takes to get signed up.

Then comes the fun part. What makes these second-chance meetings so effective is not merely that they employ so many sources of influence but also that the meetings do such a terrific job in making it crystal clear that the offenders will be convicted and will serve long sentences. Nobody does a better job of providing a warning. Unlike the Scared Straight program that focused on how bad jail is—leaving room for subjects to conclude that only saps get caught and sent to jail—with this new program, police make it abundantly clear that the offenders will indeed be caught and prosecuted.

After the first part of the meeting concludes, authorities invite the participants (who are often a bit bored with the sermon at this point) to a different room where they see posters tacked to the walls. Under each poster they find a small table with a binder on it. During previous weeks police have gathered evidence, including video footage of each of the attendees making at least one illicit drug sale.

As the drug dealers enter the new room, each is told, “Find your poster.” When they do, they discover that the poster sports a high-resolution photo of them doing a drug deal. In the adjacent binder, they see all the case evidence the police intend to use to prosecute them. Next the invitees are asked to take a seat and watch a video. At this point the local prosecutor states: “Raise your hand when you see yourself committing a felony.” One by one, they do. Next, authorities tell the offenders that they’ve been put on a special list and will be aggressively prosecuted when caught.

Combine this tactic with support from family and friends as well as job programs, and the results have been terrific. Small crimes have dropped by 35 percent in certain neighborhoods in North Carolina, and in the three neighborhoods where the initiative was implemented, 24 of 40 alleged dealers have stayed clear of the law. More importantly, community members have become far more active at reporting crimes and partnering with law enforcement officials.

All this is done without having to haul nearly as many people off to jail in order to catch their attention. Poignant, real, and immediate, threats of punishment help keep potential hardened criminals on the straight and narrow.

And to enhance the credibility of their efforts, the authorities never bluff. They invite drug dealers to the open forum, and those who don’t come are immediately arrested and prosecuted for the crimes recorded on videotape. Those who go through the program and don’t stay with their new job training or do commit a crime are also immediately arrested. Soon the word gets out that the authorities are serious about what they say. Then the mere threat of possible negative consequences becomes much more effective.

When All Else Fails, Punish

The implications here should be clear. There are times when you’re simply going to have to punish others. A shot across the bow hasn’t been enough. You’ve also tried incentives, exerted social pressure, and even appealed to the other person’s sense of values, but the immediate gratification associated with the wrong behavior still remains victorious. It’s time to make judicious use of discipline.

Consider the poor safety record of workers in the oil fields of Russia. With the fall of communism and the influx of demand for oil, Russian leaders cranked up their petroleum industry. Unfortunately, many of the new employees had not been trained in safe work practices, nor did they appear to be the slightest bit interested in learning or applying them. Coming out of years of unemployment and depression, many new hires were drug and alcohol abusers. Combine poor safety practices, alcohol, and heavy equipment, and you have the perfect recipe for accidents.

Since the immediate danger was so high and employees had been used to heavy-handed methods before going to work in the fields (and they had not responded to encouragements or hollow threats), company executives decided to punish behavior that led to accidents. Leaders notified employees that they could be randomly tested for drugs and alcohol at work or while traveling to and from the job. Then authorities did exactly that and summarily fired anyone who was found to be under the influence. This direct application of punishment, coupled with safety training, helped dramatically decrease the number of accidents. Once again, the methods may seem harsh, but when compared to the loss of life or limb, leaders argue that it’s worth it.

Consider the horrible cases of bride abduction in Ethiopia. Young girls were kidnapped on their way to or from school, raped, and then forced to marry the rapist in an effort to save face. This dreadful practice had survived in silence for generations. Nobody wanted to talk about or address the issue. However, that changed when a popular radio soap opera addressed the issue head on. Dr. Negussie Teffera—Population Media Center’s country representative in Ethiopia—worked with a staff of writers and producers to create an enormously popular radio show titled Yeken Kignit (“Looking Over One’s Daily Life”). In one story line, a much-admired character on the soap opera, a woman named Wubalem, was abducted and then eventually freed and able to marry the man she really loved. Immediately, this previously taboo topic became part of the public discourse. A letter from one female listener shows the impact the program had on the devastating problem in her community:

The story of Wubalem in your radio drama reflects clearly to the general public the harmful traditional practices in our country such as abduction and sexual violence. These practices have prevented us from sending our girls to school.… Our first child was married at the age of 14 after she was abducted. We were worrying for years as we thought that our second child would face a similar fate. At present, however, the radio drama focusing on abduction and sexual violence that you have presented to the public, and the discussions conducted on these topics, have aroused considerable popular indignation. The people have now strongly condemned such inhuman traditional practices…. Unlike in the past, special punitive measures have been taken by community people against offenders involved in such crimes. As a result, we have no worry in sending our girls to school. Our children go to school safely and return unharmed.

According to Dr. Teffera, the problem has been solved in many places in Ethiopia once and for all—not simply as a result of the discourse but by also putting into place harsh punishment for what had previously been rewarded. Now if a man assaults a young girl, instead of being allowed to keep the victim as his wife, he is put in prison.

Finally, a corporate example. One of the first questions we (the authors) ask employees in companies that complain about a lack of accountability is, “What does it take to get fired around here?” Almost always the answers have nothing to do with poor performance. “Embarrass the boss” is a common response. Another is a sarcastic “Kill a really valuable coworker.” In other words, only raging violations of ethics or political faux pas get the boot. When you hear these types of stories, you can bet that the lack of punishment for routine infractions is sending a loud message across the organization. The point isn’t that people need to be threatened in order to perform. The point is that if you aren’t willing to go to the mat when people violate a core value (such as giving their best effort), that value loses its moral force in the organization.

On the other hand, you send a powerful message about your values when you do hold employees accountable. For instance, the authors worked with a large consumer-goods company in Georgia where company leaders decided to take a harsh stance against racist behavior. To take on a norm that had lasted for centuries, the leaders decided to pick a common racist behavior and annihilate it through the judicious use of punishment. They started with something simple. No longer would the company tolerate racist jokes.

To put the plan into action, the leaders explained their stance, the first behavior they were going to eliminate, and the action they would take. Anyone who told a racist joke would be fired on the spot, without any warning or grace period. The leaders then told their employees that they would be looking to make an example of anyone who dared violate the policy, and the first time someone did, they fired him. That was the end of racist jokes in that company.

SUMMARY: STRUCTURAL MOTIVATION

Administering rewards and punishments can be a tricky business. Consequently, when you look at the extrinsic motivators you’re using to encourage or discourage behavior, take care to adhere to a few helpful principles. First, rely on personal and social motivators as your first line of attack. Let the value of the behavior itself, along with social motivators, carry the bulk of the motivational load.

When you do choose to tweak the economy, make sure the extrinsic motivators are immediately linked to vital behaviors. Take care to link rewards to the specific actions you want to see repeated. When choosing rewards, don’t be afraid to draw on small, heartfelt tokens of appreciation. Remember, when it comes to extrinsic rewards, less is often more. Do your best to reward behaviors and not merely outcomes. Sometimes outcomes hide inappropriate behaviors. Finally, if you end up having to administer punishment, first take a shot across the bow. Let people know what’s coming before you impose the punishment.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
44.201.96.213