Motivation

Today in class Professor Bill taught us about online retailers in China. I found most of the things he explained were fairly similar to American retailers. What I did find interesting was Bill's example about a employee punishment practice in China. A manager would line up all their employees in a line and then have a poor performing worker step forward onto a mate. Then the manager would tell the employee what a bad job they've been doing and pretty much humiliated them. I felt this would be especially devastating to Chinese workers because china is such a group oriented culture. The poor performing worker is taken out of the group, individualized and then humiliated in front of their coworkers. This would also be devastating as this employee would probably feel like his face was harmed through this. This would be an example of a punishment which is not a good source of motivation. However, the Chinese managers realized this when they tried this technique in America. They then adapted to technique. It was the same structure but instead of picking the worst worker they picked the best performer and praised him in front of the group as a form of positive reinforcement. This worked much better at first but then a interesting twist seemed to occur. High performing employee would get embarrassed being praised in front of everyone or maybe was told by other employee that they were making them look bad. Once this occurred the hard working employee would purposely make mistakes so they would not be embarrassed and individualized. I thought this story was so interesting as each technique seemed to work in theory but didn't results in how the managers wanted.