In Intermediair I read a short article that says that individual rewarding of achievements works negatively in teamwork. It is a research done at Technical University of Eindhoven by Ham van Vijfeijken.
The research was done in a gas and oil company (I wonder which). A team of seismologists and geografists had to cooperate intensively to make analyses of available gas resources. After the introduction of individual incentives, team members were less prepared to help each other and hold back information.
Van Vijfeijkens advice is that giving bonuses for teams that need to work very closely, like in a cockpit, shouldn't be given individual bonuses. It is almost impossible to isolate indivual performance from team performance. Indivual rewardings make team members compatitors instead of collaborators.
I'm very much interested in the relation of motivation for knowledge sharing and incentives. It seems very complicated, why do people share knowledge and why (sometimes) not? In this case it seems much influenced by the rewarding. I think that this type of (hard) reward does only work to get things started, during a short time. For the longer time, another type of motivation is needed, which comes from the person himself instead of the outside (company) world. I can see that this is a theoretical reasoning and difficult to accomplish in practice, so I'm still looking for ways how to get people intrinsically motivated.
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