Teamwork : Reward or Fruit Sharing
A Cyberspace friend emailed me a very interesting question to my article : "Monetary Reward: A Destruction to Teamwork?"(http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5621/reward.html)" i.e. "If I applied the statement in your article literally, I would simply say "Thanks team, you did well. Be happy and congratulate yourselves for having done a fine job. Your work is its own reward." They would not do such a stellar job a second time."
"Are you suggesting they should not share in the economic wealth they've created because it would destroy teamwork? Or are you suggesting I should unilaterally decide what each should receive? And if so, what are the appropriate criteria for my making such a decision? Or are you suggesting they should decide? (I think not the latter based on your ville story.)"
I wish to take this opportunity as discussion and not to suggest in anyway any recipe on a very hot and interesting topic on "team reward / compensation".
Current reality and hence the current mental model is that a Business entity has owner (s) in a legal sense and the staff are employee, who are paid for work carried out. As organisation realises more and more the importance of team to manage current business complexity, the notion of reward or compensation for teamwork comes in. This usually implies something extra over the established basic pay. In some cases, there is great disparity in pay over different groups or individuals of the employee. In the later, the market forces over time will help to set the situation in equilibrium as the dis-satisfied lower pay employee will seek other employers for higher pay, until the market generally reach an acceptable range of pay for various categories of workers / employee / professionals.
In an ideal case, if we see Business entity as a community, whereby every community member needs one another to work together, to ensure not only survival of the community, but also progressive growth of the entire community, then the question of ownership does not arise. The result or fruit of the co-operative work is to be shared among all the community member, in whatever proportion that is acceptable to the community. Acceptable in the sense that every community member still happily goes on working together as they need one another.
More and more Business entity will evolve to something similar to community-like. This is part of an emergent phenomena as we move towards a Global Village. It is also inevitable as there is much inter-dependency, inter-connectivity and inter-relationship in every aspect or affair of this world. In this way a new concept of ownership needs rethinking. This new concept may trigger a paradigm shift from pay (reward) to sharing as a result of good teamwork.. Such a shift in mindset may not be straightforward and simple as it involves changes in the thinking at all levels (owners or their representative and employee) of the organisation.
First of all, we need to realise that the notion of "teamwork" is not something romantic or nice to have. It becomes a fundamental necessity for any organisation to survive, not just because the world is getting competitive, it is also because the world has become more complex. (Refer other articles of my homepage).
Secondly, "teamwork" in organisation dealing with complexity i.e. business that involves both machine-system and human-system interaction, takes much time, practices, skill, knowledge and techniques on all members of the team. It is not just a few sessions of formal training and a group of people completing a project or two. It is a life long commitment of every team member who needs one another to produce effective action that is mutually benefiting to themselves and the environment they work in. Depending on the complexity of the business the team is involved, the team members have to constantly acquire new knowledge and techniques with frequent practices to mastery of necessary skills to realise the team goals. However many organisations take "teamwork" as romantic affair, overly rewarding a team or two in an organisation with superficial judgement on the result produced by the team.
Thirdly, no single team can work in isolation in an organisation. Each team member has to interact, to relate to another member of the organisation, who may be an individual or member of another team. Hence we have teams nested within another team. Such interaction with other members of teams is necessary to produce the desired result. Ignorance of this nested teams factor can produce un-intended disastrous result if organisation proceeds to reward a particular team that apparently produces extra immediate profit.
The essence of the above is "We have to LEARN to operate as a TEAM, and LEARN from the nested teams." But it is easy say than done. Currently the human has not had the capacity to think, interact, relate in a group called team to produce effective results constantly, especially in an organisation with rather complex business to handle.
Hence if we recognise that we are all LEARNERS (i.e. both the employer, or her representatives and the employee), how do we go about sharing the fruits that are produced by the team, not forgetting that there are other nested teams that contribute to the success claimed by this particular team?
When genuine LEARNING has taken place, the Learning Team will explore and discover more and more the following :
a) : the future of the organisation and her relationship with customers / future customers : its growth, progress, challenges without which there will be no income. This future income is directly related to present pay, rewards or compensation. But seeing the future can not take place without understanding the present. The present consists of complexity and chaos which require system thinking by the team / organisation.This also requires re-examinaiton of current pay, reward and compensation structures.
b) : the shared vision of the entire organisation i.e. the fusion of personal vision of each and every individual with that of the organisation. In this process, other aspects of the human values will be brought into play, not just monetary pay, reward or compensation. Deeper questions arise : is monetary system : pay, rewards, compensation, the only absolute focus and reference point in the life of organisation? Why such great disparity in monetary system? What does the higher pay staff do with the money, how will that affect the commuity?
c) : the mental model of each and every one of the organisation will begin to surface more and more, and in this process the differences and disparity of structures in pay, rewards and compensation will be questioned. Such structures influence behaviour and incompatible structures will greatly affect teamwork. But many so called teamwork get rewarded on the flimsy foundation of such incompatible structures. In the long term, this will dis-stabilise genuine teamwork.
The above Learning process is evolving, depending on the maturity and wisdom on the group of concerned people in an organisation. There is no quick fix, nor mathematical formula whereby monetary reward can be expressed as a function of certain variables. Some organisations have tried a design of their core-business with a few key processes, measurable with objective evidence of chosen team performance on a particular business process. This is a reasonable good attempt to move away from reward to individual to identified teams. However as discussed above, the search is on going to test human creativity, wisdom in treating each other as team-member, not employer-employee towards a shared vision that will bring fruit for greater sharing to take place.
End.
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By Andrew Wong, 23th June 1997
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