Humans are pack animals so need group rewards – Harvard Business Review

Organisations still persist in rewarding individual performance, yet humans evolved in groups and most work in groups or teams, this piece in the Harvard Business Review suggests. Employers should focus more on cultivating a strong group identity in the workplace by rewarding both collective and individual effort and, in particular, by rewarding behaviours that advance the goals of the organisation rather than the individual.

The authors – Jay Van Bavel, an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University, and Dominic Packer, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in Arts & Sciences at Lehigh University – conclude:

‘The bottom line is that leaders need to understand and harness the tribal psychology that is deeply imprinted onto the human brain. The ease with which people categorize the social world into groups speaks to our nature, and provides a powerful potential tool for leaders. Our capacity to identify with groups provides the foundations for cooperation with others—even complete strangers. Thus, great leaders must become entrepreneurs of identity.’

‘The problem with rewarding individual performers’, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, Harvard Business Review, 27 December 2016: https://hbr.org/2016/12/the-problem-with-rewarding-individual-performers