Why Employee of the Month Programs Don’t Really Work

As a comprehensive-time scholar and a 50 %-hearted retail personnel in the 1990s, I worked in the course of my holiday break breaks at a bathtub items store. Our storage place was tiny, and we shared room with the neighboring outfits retail outlet.  Every single time I went to the split place, I experienced to pass their employee of the thirty day period board.   

Yr right after calendar year, getaway right after holiday, I noticed it was the same staff. As observed in their listing of leading performers, no other employee arrived shut to her devotion for selling pre-teen fashions. The board boasted her revenue quantities, displayed her company awards and photos of her with the company’s management obtaining plaques and certificates.  

The employee continued to shatter gross sales documents. At some point, the board shifted to entirely monitoring the all-star as she competed nationally to outsell staff at other locations. A cartoon thermostat depicted her finish purpose, and the mounting paper mercury showed her soaring development. It was amazing, but I experienced to ponder — was it well worth it for any other personnel to even try out? They’d never stay up.   

Personnel of the thirty day period programs are commonly attributed to psychologist B.F. Skinner and his notion of behaviorism. In his operate, Skinner instructed that constructive reinforcement, these kinds of as a reward or acknowledgement, strengthens a wanted conduct. Gratifying personnel for a long time of support or outstanding performance was believed to be a way to boost the preferred conduct.  

Social scientists, even so, are progressively discovering about social comparison and how it motivates conduct.  Social comparison takes place in both personalized and expert options, and it can be manipulated to improve productivity at function. But scientific studies have also uncovered that the wrong established-up can have disastrous penalties for the firm —and the employee held up as a shining example.  

Up and Down  

Students have lengthy viewed as social comparison as element of the human working experience. In the 1950s, the idea became extra operationalized as researchers thought of how social comparison functioned and what it intended to the specific. Leon Festinger was credited with coining the expression in 1954 in his function examining how teams converse and arrive to arrangement.  

Festinger theorized that social comparison occurred in modest teams when a particular person desired to consider their viewpoints or skills and did so by internally evaluating them selves to other people. With social comparison, a particular person sought information about how they associated to the team, and compared by themselves with somebody who was similar or had identical characteristics, a course of action later on called exact-stage comparison.   

As other scholars examined the principle, they found there ended up predictable conditions in which individuals in comparison themselves with other individuals. Downward comparison, for example, was normally witnessed in situations in which a particular person felt threatened and deliberately chose a comparison goal who they considered significantly less able.  Additional just lately, research have discovered that social media buyers upwardly compare when they interact with consumers they deem as personally or professionally thriving.   

No matter if upward or downward, drive for social comparison is attributed to a drive for self-enhancement or self-analysis, equally of which add to a person’s feeling of self-worth. And it’s primarily based on a person’s travel to recognize who they are with respect to a shaped group.  

Each and every team has its personal tradition, and simply because social comparison is a cultural construct, scientists find that some teams, significantly workplaces, nurture social comparison. But the outcomes don’t normally perform as meant.   

‘I Really feel Bitter’ 

Distinctive companies use social comparison, these kinds of as personnel of the month honors, to motivate upward social comparisons. Businesses also use employee rankings to inspire aggressive habits or present aggressive rewards packages. That way, the optimum executing personnel earns recognition that some others do not.  

Scientific tests have observed that envy can inspire productiveness, but it can also set off damaging thoughts that lead to decreased productivity and sabotage or attacks on the employee held up as a job design.   

In one study published in 2007 in the Journal of Used Psychology, participants ended up questioned to consider about their workplaces and upwardly assess on their own with an staff of their choice.  They ended up then questioned to fill out a questionnaire pertaining to their emotions toward the personnel these kinds of as, “I come to feel bitter” or “I often truly feel hatred toward X.”  Participants then done a questionnaire as to how generally they engaged in hostility or attempts at sabotage from the other worker. The study discovered that thoughts of unfairness and envy exasperated the participant’s hostility toward the other personnel. They admitted to slowing down the target’s correspondence, conversing about them behind their again, and actively making an attempt to cause them issues.  

Social comparison also diminished staff goodwill. One particular review followed financial institution tellers who were up for a advertising but shed the prospect to yet another worker.  Prior to shedding the posture, the financial institution tellers rated the other staff as both likeable and comparable to them selves.  Right after the promotee assumed their new position, the rankings fell and emotions of dislike greater.   

So would the all-star staff I noticed in the nineties have been subject to sabotage?  Did she finally have to take in lunch alone?

Not just. Rather, her employer structured a general performance opposition, which reports obtain can spark envy. As a substitute of incentivizing workers to upwardly evaluate themselves and aspire to do greater, staff are a lot more apt to have interaction in counterproductive behaviors at do the job, which include trying to undermine the goal. The result is that business-sponsored social comparison can guide to staff losing trust with each individual other.  Not astonishingly, researchers advocate providers maintain their incentive applications — but probably retain the rewards on their own tranquil.