140 Part 2Striving for Performance5 Creating a Motivating
Workplace: Rewards
and Job Redesign
Employee Recognition:
Showing People That
They Matter
Variable-Pay Programs:
Improving Productivity
Linking Productivity-Related
Incentives to Motivation
Theories
Motivating Beyond
Productivity
Designing Motivating Jobs
6 Evaluating the Use of
Rewards in the
Workplace
Beware the Signals That
Rewards Send
Caveat Emptor: Motivation
Theories Are Culture-Bound
Can We Just Eliminate
Rewards?
Putting It All Together
4 Do equity and fairness matter? Individuals look for fairness in the reward sys-
tem. Rewards should be perceived by employees as related to the inputs they bring
to the job. At a simplistic level, this means that experience, skills, abilities, effort,
and other obvious inputs should explain differences in performance and, hence, pay,
job assignments, and other obvious rewards.
5 How can rewards and job design motivate employees? When organizations
want to reward individuals for specific high performance, they often turn to
employee recognition programs. Recognizing an employee’s superior performance
often costs little or no money.
When organizations want to improve productivity, they often use variable-pay pro-
grams. With these programs, a portion of an employee’s pay is based on some indi-
vidual and/or organizational measure of performance.
Managers can enrich jobs following the job characteristics model. The model
tells us that jobs that offer skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and
feedback tend to be more motivating for employees.
6 What kinds of mistakes are made in reward systems? Individuals are respon-
sive to the signals sent out by organizations, and if they determine that some activ-
ities are not valued, they may not engage in them, even when the firm expects
employees to do so. Rewards should be linked to the type of performance expected.
Rewards are also culture-bound. Individuals respond to rewards in general, and
specific rewards, differently, depending upon what culture they come from. Finally,
rewards are not always necessary. In the right context, individuals often motivate
themselves intrinsically and can achieve quite high levels of performance doing
so. We also know that giving rewards for things that were previously done for
intrinsic motivation will decrease motivation.