The Success and Failure of Carrot and Stick Philosophy

The Success of Carrot and Stick Philosophy
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Table of Contents TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u The success of Carrot and Stick Philosophy PAGEREF _Toc63085107 \h 3Failure of Carrot and Stick Philosophy PAGEREF _Toc63085108 \h 4Type X or I PAGEREF _Toc63085109 \h 5Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc63085110 \h 5References PAGEREF _Toc63085111 \h 6
The Success of Carrot and Stick Philosophy
The philosophy of carrot and sticks is based on the external reward system of motivation. It implies that people can be motivated using the positive or negative reinforcement mechanism. The approach has been successful in demanding control and discipline from the leader and requiring the subordinates to follow. In my personal experience, the approach was successful, where decisions needed to be implemented without delay. E.g., during my internship at the local pharmaceutical company, I found the sales manager with an authoritarian leadership style. The company had to meet the quarterly targets, so he designed a sales force with short-term, measurable goals for sales, provide a timeline, and implemented the strategy right away. The successful people were granted monetary rewards, while the non-performers were pushed by constant feedback. The situation demanded imminent action, and the manager was successful in motivating his workforce that way. It has been found that transactional leadership style influences job satisfaction of employees positively CITATION Baa16 \l 1033 (Baah & Ampofo, 2016). The carrot and stick leadership style was successful in that scenario, as there was little to no requirement for brainstorming, and the situation has mutual benefits for the manager and the employees. If the team would meet the sales target, they all would get the benefits for it and were rewarded. A common goal and the organization's collaborative culture made it feasible to achieve the goals through this method.
Apart from the monetary rewards, the company had a culture of appreciating the performers through awards and certificates. Social recognition is an essential factor of external motivation CITATION Meh17 \l 1033 (Mehta, Dahl, & Zhu, 2017). Social recognition plays a critical role in motivating people, and this strategy was successful in the organization as people worked hard and achieved a majority of their targets.
Failure of Carrot and Stick Philosophy
External rewards often fail in delivering the right outcome because of their limitations. One of the experiences that taught me about the carrot and stick philosophy failure is a group project done for one of my college courses. The teacher divided the class into groups of five students made one leader among them randomly. Rather than group performance, the students were valued on their contribution to the project and rated one another on their performance. The external reward was an additional five marks that had to be allocated to the best performer in the group. This approach's immediate effect was that people began to compete within the group instead of acting as a team striving for the mutual goal, i.e., to deliver the bes...