Management is by Faith not Works
A bit of musing on evangelical capitalism
by Carl Bettis
This post is an expansion of a comment I made on a Mastodon toot by @quixoticgeek@v.st.
In my roughly four decades in the workforce, I’ve worked at a couple of places that had profit-sharing bonuses. It was great! Everyone had reason to help everyone else succeed, and everyone was motivated to act in the company’s best interest.
Sadly, it didn't last. In both cases, new upper management replaced profit-sharing with a competitive bonus system, explaining that profit-sharing “rewards freeloaders.”
This is the sort of change that definitely alters workers' behavior, but probably not as intended.
If my pay depends on “performing better” than you, I have no financial incentive to help you do your job. I have incentive to hoard information, hog credit, shift blame, see you fail. I even have incentive to sabotage you. I wouldn’t, but any place that has a freeloader problem has people who would undermine coworkers.
Now, I doubt the idea that there even is a freeloader problem is data-driven. It’s an article of faith. But if your company really does suffer from freeloaders:
(a) You need to look at your hiring process.
(b) Far from being rewarded by profit-sharing, freeloaders are hurting their own bank accounts.
(c) Under profit-sharing, a freeloader's coworkers have every reason to call them out on it. But if you and I are competing for scarce bonus dollars, I should gladly watch you slack off. Your laziness is money in my pocket!
I doubt, too, that hard data exists showing that replacing profit-sharing bonuses with competitive bonuses improves a company’s bottom line. I didn’t find any studies on the subject. (I didn’t search very hard.)
Often, executive decisions are driven not by pragmatism, but by capitalist dogma. Profit-sharing smells faintly of socialism and it must be eradicated, facts and reason be damned! But competition is always good, even if it’s the members of our team working against one another.
(I won’t attempt a sports metaphor here. I’d only confuse you and embarrass myself.)
