Annotated Bibliography: Harvard Business Review

“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.

Reward, whether it is financial (in terms of a monetary bonus) or simply praise and the recognition of success, will positively impact levels of motivation within a team. For example, a sales team working towards a target, that if achieved will mean a financial bonus will be more motivated than a team without this incentive, especially if a high percentage of that team have money as a primary motivating factor. The effect of praise and recognition on staff will be a team that feels valued and appreciated by its organisation. This will help promote harmony and make for a stronger, healthier and a more motivated team. A team that is not praised and recognised will soon start to feel that their hard work is not appreciated.

They explained that: “Changes in incentives influence human behavior in predictable ways”. The main point of this concept is that the more attractive an option is the more likely an individual to choose it. Another point that they also focused on was the fact that if a particular product more costly, the more unappealing it will become to the consumer. They used examples such as employees will worker harder if they feel that they will be greatly rewarded or a student will study material that they feel will be on an

Lastly, they explain the fundamental ideas of the book. Incentives are “means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.”; according to the authors, they “are the cornerstone of modern life”. Levitt and Dubner also focus the book on the following concepts:

e. Positive reinforcement presents an encouraging element to an individual after a wanted behavior is demonstrated. It helps to make the wanted behavior more likely to occur again in the future. An example of this is when a mother gives her child a treat after cleaning up his room. The child is more likely clean his room in the future because he received positive enforcement for performing the desired behavior.

In the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner note “An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often-tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation” (16). This is to showcase the amount of power an incentive can have over a person or a situation; either good or bad. Humans are found to use incentives when it comes to making daily decisions. Often, people need motives to proceed with their plans. Some tend to make either moral, social, or economic incentive. The moral incentive is about self-respect; keeping in check with what was taught to believe is right and wrong. The social incentive is how the public views the person; wanting to look good in front others. Economic incentive, however, would relate to monetary benefit. While all three incentives can affect people’s decisions, economic

At the for profit college, the upper management is experiencing an issue with their employee’s morale. Because there are government regulations that do not allow for traditional sales bonuses be given to employees, they need to find a way to offer their employees, who do everything they can to get as many enrollments as possible (just like any other sales company), go without any type of incentive program. This paper will outline the project that upper management and executives have decided to use for an incentive program. This will help improve employee morale, enrollment and profit for the organization.

You have positive incentives and negative incentives. “Positive incentives are those that either increase benefits or decrease costs of an action, encouraging the action; negative incentives are those that either decrease benefits or increase costs of an action,

applying, including altering incentives. In the second section, we discuss behaviors to which these strategies can be

Kohn problem with rewards is as follows: they reduce intrinsic motivation for short-term “solutions” that lead to people becoming dependant on extrinsic motivators. He details the impact that the rewards have on misbehaved kids and working adults: they “. . . do not generally alter the attitudes and emotional commitments that underlie . . . behaviors” (pg. 41). There is no lasting effect on the behavior other than overlooking a problem for a small

Therefore, it leads to the conclusion that in this case the main issue is appropriate employees motivation and satisfying job conditions, which could be achieved by choosing right incentives plan. However, sticking to the same incentives plan also might not be a good idea because people usually get used to such things very easily. As it can be seen from Engstrom Auto Mirror Company’s case employee’s motivation and morale can

There are many examples of incentive programs that are used to motivte someone and most of the time they work. The felling of success, or the feeling of failure can be an incentive and influence motivation. When someone has incentives they are more likely to complete that goal because there is something they gain at the end. When it comes to someone doing something they really don’t want to do or don’t like to do incentives are something that help that person complete that task, it keeps them going. For example someone may not enjoy writing papers but it is necessary to write papers in college. Getting a good grade and

Harvard Management Company is a company which built by Harvard University itself. That means HMC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. The company built for managing the financial matter and development of the university. Because the company is wholly owned by Harvard University, the Directors of HMC is directly choosen by President and Fellow of Harvard College. The function of HMC is for managing University’s financing especially endowment. Endowment become the important income for HMC. The main job of HMC is to earn money for the endowment. The management do some investment to get the

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.

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.