Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Dr. Gitika Dutta (Faculty Member, IIPM Hyderabad) is of the view that a carrot-and-stick policy need not always be resorted to, for building employee loyalty

Managers can, and often do, provide a range of incentivising and disincentivising KITA – bonuses, rewards, rules, work conditions, status – hygiene factors. These will have an effect, but will it be desired and long-term? A resounding ‘no’! Alfred Kohn sums it up neatly: “Do incentives work? The answer depends on what we mean by ‘work’. Rewards, like punishments, are extremely effective at producing one thing, and only one thing: temporary compliance. But carrot and sticks are strikingly ineffective at producing lasting change in attitudes or even behaviours. They do not create an enduring commitment to any value or action; they merely, and temporarily, change what we do.”

Some two dozen studies from social psychology have shown that people who expect to receive a reward for completing a task (or doing it successfully) do not perform as well as those who do not. This has been found with all sorts of rewards, people, and tasks (with the most destructive effect when the task involves creativity). This means that desired changes cannot be achieved by dangling goodies. Organisations need to learn that incentives only work for short-term movement; if you want motivation, do not start here. Can an organisation train its employees to be motivated? No! Motivation comes from within an individual. We do things, or do them well because the outcome is appealing to us. Read More..

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posted by Editorial at 4:49 PM 0 Comments

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Iran: The war is over, finally!

With the Obama administration playing down the Bushehr reactor issue, US finally accepts Iran; B&E brings out a completely hidden fact of the timing of the State Department’s pro-Iran statement

“We recognize that the Bushehr reactor is designed to provide civilian nuclear power and do not view it as a proliferation risk!” With this one statement on August 13, 2010, Darby Holladay of the US State Department created history by changing a decades’ long policy stand of United States towards Iran. The statement was brilliantly timed, given the propensity with which Israel was preparing to attack Iran’s nuclear plant. The statement also defined a historic moment in US-Israel relations, by communicating to Israel that the US was no longer ready to blindly accept any anti-Iran tirade.

These voices from the Obama government express an opinion considered improbable just a few months back, when US was said to be on the brink of attacking Iran. In February 2010, Obama had warned, “Despite their (Iran’s) posturing that their nuclear power is only for civilian use, they in fact continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization.” Given such a negative statement, the current US stand is momentous.

For the trained political analyst though, the past year should have been enough to give much evidence of what was around the corner in not only Obama-Iran relations, but most importantly Obama-Israel relations. Last year, when US Vice President Joe Biden, during an interview with ABC Sunday, announced that US would not “stand in the way” of Israel attacking Iran, US President Barack Obama had immediately backtracked asserting that US had “absolutely not” given any go ahead to Israel for attacking Iran. Obama had reiterated further, “We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East.” For Israel, that was bad news, and not just because of worsening political relations with US – Israeli fighter crafts would have had to pass over Iraq to attack Iran; and Iraq was under US control then.


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posted by Editorial at 12:01 PM