The Effects of the participation in an employee reward program on work accuracy

The Effects of the participation in an employee reward program on work accuracy

Introduction

Rewards and motivation are each quite large topic, each with many hundreds if not thousands of books and studies within their respective subject (Hein 2009), it is therefore necessary to limit the paper, primarily to money-based reward and reward systems.

The rewards can be looked at in many different ways depending on what theories and from what point of view they are applied. They can even be looked at through the eyes of sociology, psychology, economics and general motivation theories (Brooks 2009).

To limit this paper it will not include a full description or an analysis of rewards but a presentation that will help linking rewards and motivation together. The paper will look at wages and reward systems in general, not focusing on any specific nation, region or culture, - nevertheless most books look at the subject through western eyes at the western part of the world, the paper looks mostly at motivation and rewarding from a western point of view.

The subject that has been chosen for this paper is motivation of employees, especially via an intrinsic/extrinsic motivational approach and how rewards can be used to raise the productivity and production of an organization. This thesis has its idea on the basis that motivation is an essential part of a modern organization.

Discussion

Problem statement

Most companies are built on a concept, where efficiency or productivity are keywords, whatever the overall goal is the highest attainable service, quality or profit. Through history there are times when it is more difficult to run a company than ever before, as in the financial crisis in recent years. Often companies apply the money as their key motivator to improve efficiency or output, as part of their reward system - based on measurement of quality or production - are used to influence the employee motivation and job performance. To verify whether monetary-based rewards are useful as motivators, the motivational theories as the mechanism behind rewards are in focus.

Background

Most companies incorporate some kind of a reward system as a motivational tool, these reward systems come in all shapes and sizes (Brooks 2009). Used at the small store at the street corner to huge multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees. They all apply different types and combinations of reward systems but with the same goal in mind, to increase efficiency and reduce employment turnover (Armstrong, Stephens 2005).

Reward systems have been defined by Wilson as "A reward system is any process within an organization that encourages, reinforcement, or compensates people for taking a particular set of actions. It may be formal or informal, cash or non-cash Immediate or delayed "(Wilson 1995). The Business Dictionary goes even further focusing more on the emphasize of a desirable behavior “Scheme to support and reinforce desirable behavior, such as wage rate that increased with the productivity of the worker” (Business Dictionary).

Whenever you want a monkey to do a simple ...