Management: How to Pay Employees for Great Ideas
By Rachel Emma S.,blogs.wsj.com
Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that group variable pay>>>
Most companies say they want employees to be more innovative, to the point that it’s become a nearly meaningless buzzword. But can you actually pay people to innovate?
Yes–depending on how you pay them, according to a pair of Canadian researchers.
In a review of seven years of corporate survey data,
the researchers
found that individual performance bonuses and salary did not spur a rise
in new ideas and products. However, group or team bonuses,
profit-sharing plans and indirect pay, such as robust employee benefits,
did relate to higher creativity and better problem-solving at work.
“You can pay employees to innovate if you do it properly. But be
aware that individual incentives really are not going to help,” says
Bruce Curran, a co-author of the research, and a doctoral student at the University of Toronto.
Curran speculates that group bonuses encourage the kind of team-based
brainstorming that leads to meaningful new ideas. “Innovation is in
many respects collaborative, and these incentives are encouraging
collaboration,” he says.
What’s more, rewarding teams may allow workers to take more
short-term risks because their own pay isn’t necessarily on the line.
“If you go down a blind alley, you aren’t going to be punished for
that,” he says.
Curran and co-author Scott Walsworth of the University of
Saskatchewan studied survey data compiled by the Canadian government
from nearly 3,000 workplaces. The data included information about how
workers were paid, as well as questions about whether firms had
developed or significantly improved a product or production process, and
whether the firm created an innovation that was new to the market. The
paper was published in the most recent edition of Human Resource Management Journal. Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that group variable pay>>>
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire