Week 1 Post by Leslie

In my job, communications consultants partner regularly with specialists in the areas of talent management and compensation to design and communicate employee incentive plans. Thanks in part to the challenging economic climate of the last few years, we’ve seen more and more companies adopting pay-for-performance incentive plans for employees at all levels. Not only do we share Frederik Taylor’s view that responsibility lies with management to design effective incentive plans (Wren, 2009), we also believe that good communication is essential to the success of incentive plan implementation. However, our practices do diverge from scientific management in our treatment of the human element. Despite Taylor’s protests that properly practiced scientific management maintains “the proper personal relations … between the employers and men, (as cited in Wren, 2009, p. 152), most of my colleagues would argue that strict adoption of scientific management has a detrimental effect on employee attraction and retention. Fayol’s acknowledgement of the role of job enlargement in increasing employee engagement (Wren, 2009) is a step in the right direction, but as a whole, Taylor, Fayol, and Weber – while offering many excellent management principles -- undervalue the individual employee.

Did anyone else find Taylor’s description of the motivations for “soldiering” particularly interesting? He observed that employees would “soldier,” or underwork, for a number of reasons, most of which boiled down to fears that high performance would not be rewarded in the long term (Wren, 2009). No doubt Taylor had great insight into the incentive needs of Midvale’s engineers, yet I cannot help but wonder if better communication (including clear “if, then” scenarios and direct address of worker assumptions) could have solved performance problems just as readily as a revised incentive plan.

This week’s reading reminded me of a BBC News article I heard referenced on NPR. Links to two full articles are provided below, but to sum it up, the Department of Education in England and Wales recently announced its recommendation to implement a pay-for-performance compensation approach for teachers (“British Teachers,” 2012; Coughlan, 2012). While the department’s recommendations are complex and include several pay-for-performance models as well as the idea of “different pay in different areas,” a surface evaluation of the suggestions certainly brings scientific management theory to mind (“British Teachers,” 2012; Coughlan, 2012). The committee urges an approach in which “the best teachers are rewarded while the weak are discouraged from staying in the profession” (“British Teachers,” 2012). If that doesn’t divide teachers into “first-class” and “second-class” workers, I don’t know what would!

Perhaps teachers’ unions would have better received better-focused recommendations offering greater anticipation and consideration of teacher concerns. What do you think?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18089505
http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/british-teachers-paid-performance-141620652.html

References

British teachers to be paid for performance? (2012, May 1). Indo Asian News Service. Retrieved from http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/british-teachers-paid-performance-141620652.html

Coughlan, S. (2012, May 16). Michael Gove pushes for performance pay for teachers. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18089505

Wren, D. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (2009). The evolution of management thought (6th ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.