Rewarding the team rather than the individual: under what conditions?
Rewarding a collective result seems an obvious way to encourage cooperation. The management question is more precise: does a team reward improve performance when work organisation and assessment criteria remain individual?
What the literature establishes
Yvonne Garbers and Udo Konradt (2014, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology) synthesised research on individual and team-based financial incentives. Their meta-analysis identifies a positive average effect of team-based incentives on performance, without establishing that they work in every configuration. It therefore suggests treating a team bonus as an arrangement requiring careful design, rather than an automatic lever.
Aligning the work and the reward
Ruth Wageman (1995, Administrative Science Quarterly) studied the relationships between task interdependence, outcome interdependence and group effectiveness in a technical maintenance setting. Her findings highlight the importance of alignment between how people work and how outcomes are assessed and rewarded. Asking for collective output while retaining individual rewards is therefore not a neutral combination.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that individual bonuses simply need to be replaced with a shared bonus. These studies do not justify that generalisation: sharing a reward does not, by itself, make tasks interdependent or give a team the means to influence the result. The scope of the rewarded unit should follow an analysis of actual work, rather than merely the boundaries of the organisational chart. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not settle
The meta-analysis brings together different settings and performance measures, while the field study concerns a particular organisation. Neither establishes the optimal bonus amount for a team in Sion or guarantees a lasting benefit. Nor is increased output enough to establish progress if quality, safety or mutual support deteriorates.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme, one possible application in Sion is to examine an existing team reward before proposing a new one. In hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or Alpine tourism, a team can select a clearly bounded process and calculate the number of outputs accepted without rework as a proportion of all outputs delivered, while maintaining a separate safety indicator. If reward rules change, comparing this indicator before and after across comparable operating periods, with a comparison team where possible, can document the change without automatically attributing it to the bonus. The success criterion should be agreed in advance: an improvement in work accepted without rework, with no deterioration in safety. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Sion
- team performance
- Sion
- research
- training sion