Well, okay, this isn't... Orgasmic... But it's still strange.
Anyone have any stories similiar to that?Lesson 4 - Positive and Negative Incentives
The Soviet Union & Light Bulbs ( 25600 Bytes )
A good way to understand how people respond to positive and negative incentives is to look at specific examples of behavior. Why do you act as you do? You probably believe that it is the preferred way to behave. You probably don't work for the joy
of the job as much as for what you can get from the money you make.
What if, instead of being paid for the hours you worked, you were paid by some other criteria? Imagine that you are a server at a restaurant. You will get paid by how many customers you can rush through, instead of a base pay and tips. What if you were paid by the pounds of food you carried instead? Sure, that sounds silly but think about it. What if your pay was determined by that, wouldn't you have an incentive to recommend food items that were heavier?
The former Soviet Union gives us lots of examples of what can happen when the incentives aren't right. One report described a mountain of size 10 work boots behind a factory. The workers had been told to make as many boots as they could with the resources they were given. The way they exceeded their quota was by making only one style and one size! Obviously, it was a waste of resources; the Soviets didn't get the incentives right. The reason that story made the news is that someone sneaked out a picture of the factory, almost dwarfed by the mountain of boots outside rotting away! A sure waste of resources yet the people at the factory had done what the incentives had told them to do. They even got "over-quota production bonuses" that year!
What incentives do you work for? Money? Grades? Popularity? Influence? Recognition?
Professor Judy Thornton of the University of Washington reports that when she was a student in Moscow "...the small, blue metal lamp on my dormitory
desk was so heavy that it took two people to lift it. The lamp base had been filled with lead..."
The incentive was for making tons of lamps. What if the workers had been told to make the largest number of lamps they could? The lamps would have been very, very light and flimsy.
My favorite tale was one of a window glass making factory. They were first rewarded on the basis of how many pounds of window glass they produced - they made it several inches thick, worthless for window glass. Next they were to be paid by the number of square inches of window glass they made. Yep, you're right, it was paper thin. But they got their bonuses again! Incentives DO matter.