Incentives for Employees

Do incentives really create better employees, or do incentives create greedy employees? I believe incentives can motivate employees to an extent, but after a while the employee will EXPECT more incentives in order to do the job they were hired to do. One article I read called, “Equity, the unifying factor - equal treatment and privileges of executives and employees,” seems to agree with my theory of incentives creating greed. In this article the author talks about corporations focusing less on individual incentives and more on meeting corporate goals.
Another article I found called, “Keeping Workers,” lists one way of motivating workers is to offer incentives. In my experience with incentives, the offer of extra money for a job well done is met with great effort by an employee to achieve task at hand; which is usually part of their job duties anyways. Once the task is complete and there is not an incentive to go above and beyond normal tasks, the employee becomes complacent and it takes more incentives to get them motivated again.
In summary, if an employee works hard, on a consistent basis, to achieve the goals of an organization, than I fully support incentives. However, if an employee is only driven by incentives, it’s probably time to replace that employee.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_n2_v37/ai_12070747/pg_2

http://www.sasknetwork.ca/html/Employers/workplace/rewardsandincentives.htm