Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn Every now and again comes a book that changes the way we think or the assumptions that we make about our lives.
One of the greatest assumptions that we make in almost every walk of life is that we can make others work harder by offering them rewards. There is a whole industry dedicated to the provision of rewards programmes for performance and almost every organisation on this planet in one way or another runs their business on the basis of providing rewards for performance. Let’s be clear right here that the reward is something extra, something other than the wage that has been agreed as the going rate for the job. Alfie Kohn in his book, “Punished By Rewards”, exposes the assumption that providing these rewards improves performance. He shows us in detail in any number of different cases how wrong we are to believe this and shows just how destructive the practice of rewarding performance really is. Without reading “Punished by Rewards” it may be difficult to appreciate Alfie’s point but let me give an example from the book. Alfie tells us one story about a scheme sponsored by Pizza Hut in North America to encourage children to read. He tells us that in order to encourage literacy, children were promised a pizza for every book that they read. On the surface it sounds perfectly laudable until you examine the detail of what actually happened. These children instead of being encouraged to read, now saw books as obstacles between themselves and a pizza, and that the obstacle had to be surmounted as quickly and with as little effort as possible. Thus instead of finding joy in the act of reading, the books these children read were selected by them on the basis of how thin they were and the size of the typeface so that they could qualify for their free pizzas as quickly as possible. As Alfie notes, instead of encouraging children to develop an interest in books, this programme produced “fat kids who couldn’t read.” In the first five chapters of this book Alfie Kohn turns our understanding of what is accepted as a basic tenet of our management practice, on its head. Continue<http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/punished-by-rewards-by-alfie-kohn/> http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/punished-by-rewards-by-alfie-kohn/ best regards *[email protected]* -- Who is Panna Lal? <http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/who-is-panna-lal/>
