Motivational aspects of corporate productivity maximisation: a field study

Over the past 30 years, there have been many proposed approaches to maximising corporate productivity. Most of these require substantial investment in ‘productivity improvement programmes’ involving new technology, additional capital infrastructure, or process changes such as business process reengineering. A recent theoretical paper suggests that instead of investing in these purported improvements, corporations might be better off investing in revamping their employee goal-behaviour-metric-reward (GBMR) systems, which tie corporate goals to individual goals, articulate desired behaviours for each employee, describe the metrics used to measure performance and establish appropriate rewards to drive desired behaviour. This paper reports the results of a field study in which the productivity of 13 corporations was correlated with the quality of their GBMR systems. A positive correlation was observed, indicating that the GBMR system correlates fairly well with corporate productivity and that focusing on improving a company’s GBMR system may be a cost-effective approach to maximising corporate productivity.