American Economic Association
Incentives in Organizations Author(s): Robert Gibbons Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 115-132 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646897 Accessed: 26/03/2009 10:39
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By treating this model briefly, I do not mean to imply that the tradeoff between incentives and insurance is irrelevant, only that it is not nearly as central as it was once deemed.' In describing this and subsequent models, I omit some assumptions, derivations, and results; Prendergast (forthcoming) offers thorough introductions to many of these models. Consider an agent who takes an unobservable action a to produce output y. For example, the production function might be linear, y = a + s, where s is a noise term. The principal owns the output but contracts to share it with the agent by paying a wage w contingent on output. For example, the wage contract might be linear, w = s + by,where the intercept s is the salary and the slope b is the bonus rate. The agent's payoff is w - c(a), the realized wage minus the disutility of action c(a). The principal's payoff is y - w, the realized output net of wages. The key idea in this model is that the agent is risk-averse. (The principal may be as well.) A higher bonus rate b thus creates stronger incentives for the agent, but also imposes more risk on the agent. The extreme case of b = 0 offers the agent full insurance but creates no incentives; the other extreme, b = 1, gives the agent full title to the output y but offers the agent no insurance at all. The efficient bonus rate is between zero and one, depending on factors such
“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life”(Levitt and Dubner 12). Levitt and Dubner once mentioned in their book “Freakonomics”. According to Oxford dictionary, incentives are something tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity (“incentives”). In business field, incentives are something given by bosses to encourage their employees to endeavour in bringing benefits to their business. For a simple example, the employee who hits the monthly or year sales target will get cash or prizes as incentives. Apparently, these incentives are something that motivates employees maintains their great performance and also to motivate other employee, whoever wants to get the incentives, work harder.
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Having buy-in from key stakeholders is crucial for the success of an incentive pay system. For example, if top management does not support such a program, lower-level managers will place little importance on effectively administering the program. Hence, a lack of top management support often leads to a lack of accountability. (Gordon, Kaswin)
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Pfeffer, J. & Sutton, R.I. (2007). Do Financial Incentives drive company performance? Harvard Business School
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1. Incentive compensation is a major practice that has continually been adopted by healthcare organizations, especially for managers. Most of these organizations use this tool as a means of rewarding employees financial for outstanding performance. Generally, incentive compensation involves the use of monetary reward for managers to attain specific established goals. Therefore, incentive compensation can be a motivational tool that benefits health care managers and the entire organization because it enables managers to achieve greater compensation while promoting organizational productivity. As the Chief Executive Officer of a hospital, I would design an incentive compensation program for my management team by aligning the financial rewards with business objectives and people costs. This will involve the use of a comprehensive approach that examines basic pay, health benefits, incentive opportunities, and retirement programs. The alignment of the compensation program is geared towards promoting organizational productivity and employee motivation.
Serious issues with incentives also include employees telling their superiors that everything is under control when it isn?t, just to save their bonus. Kohn then states that ?There are very few things that threaten an organisation as much as a hoard of incentive driven individuals trying to curry favour with the incentive dispenser? (1993, p.56).
Keeping employees motivated in addition to creating incentives and/or additional ways for employees to receive more compensation will create better performance overall within an organization. Contrary if company B gives their employees incentives to perform, without any motivational tactics they probably will not have as many top performances as company A, in addition the company may only seek short term rewards verses have long term success. Lack of motivation for employees within an organization, can cause long term damage for the company’s success. Different things motivate everyone; therefore there should be a system in place to keep employees motivated for the long term success of the company. In the MBM textbook under the concept of incentives, compensation, and motivation, there are a couple of different views of how it should be applied within an organization. We will discuss The Social Role of Profit, Personal Profit and Losses, and the way Market-Based Management view how incentives, compensation, and motivation should be applied and the things that effectively drive employees’ actions while at work.
To foster competitiveness and deliver better results, there is a program called STACK where employees are ranked based on the work done and their incentive is decided based on it. Better the rank, better the incentives.
Today, competition between the businesses is extremely high thus companies need to find ways to be competitive. Organizations prepare the best market strategy to increase the company performance and the ways to keep their employee motivation on the highest level to perform well within the competition. At that time, several incentive pay programs play an important role for every organization to perform well within the competition.
To motivate employees to work towards reaching organizational goals, managers frequently depend on some form of enticement. Beyond monetary compensation, awards and additional types of acknowledgment can be given, and the ability to choose a work schedule is a possibility. A reasonable pay system, which would be an incentive for individuals and groups to achieve organizational goals, is a hardship manager’s face (Jones & George, 2011). Within the company that I work for, every quarter awards are presented to Customer Service Agents who have maintained a 95 percent or above quality score. Monetary awards are given out as well as time off coupons.