I once read and author who claimed that goldbricking, malingering and sabotage were really just market effects. When employers pay too little or working conditions are too harsh, employees naturally find ways to remedy the problem. There seems to be a similar mechanism, here.
The pinnacle of this has to be the competitive incentive programs used at certain large software firms. In a competitive review system, the best policy is to passively sabotage your coworkers. This is robust even in the case where you are the rare superstar who has all the knowledge (in which case you simply hoard your knowledge). Those that try to be stars simply attract more coworker subversion. The countervailing factor is the general misery caused by this system. Employees will continue to sabotage until the work environment is as bad as they are willing to tolerate at the prevailing pay level. Thus, the only guaranteed result of a competitive review system seems to be maximally low morale and the majority of employee effort spent on gaming the system.
The late W. Edwards Deming (one of my heroes) proposed that the solution to this (in a manufacturing context) was to have a collective reward system (e.g., profit sharing), and to treat high and low performers as special cases. High performers should be examined to see if their techniques can be generalized across the organization, and low performers are examined to see if their performance is a result of the system or (rarely) a cause idiosyncratic to the low performer.
Many of the software types I've spoken to balk at such a method being applied to their organizations, because "creating software is not a production line process." This seems specious to me.
Have any of you if you've worked in a software house that had a reward system in place like the one Deming advocates?
The pinnacle of this has to be the competitive incentive programs used at certain large software firms. In a competitive review system, the best policy is to passively sabotage your coworkers. This is robust even in the case where you are the rare superstar who has all the knowledge (in which case you simply hoard your knowledge). Those that try to be stars simply attract more coworker subversion. The countervailing factor is the general misery caused by this system. Employees will continue to sabotage until the work environment is as bad as they are willing to tolerate at the prevailing pay level. Thus, the only guaranteed result of a competitive review system seems to be maximally low morale and the majority of employee effort spent on gaming the system.
The late W. Edwards Deming (one of my heroes) proposed that the solution to this (in a manufacturing context) was to have a collective reward system (e.g., profit sharing), and to treat high and low performers as special cases. High performers should be examined to see if their techniques can be generalized across the organization, and low performers are examined to see if their performance is a result of the system or (rarely) a cause idiosyncratic to the low performer.
Many of the software types I've spoken to balk at such a method being applied to their organizations, because "creating software is not a production line process." This seems specious to me.
Have any of you if you've worked in a software house that had a reward system in place like the one Deming advocates?