Punished for Bounties: A Book Review by Alfie Kohn

There is an entire industry dedicated to providing performance rewards programs and almost every organization on this planet, in one way or another, runs their business on the basis of providing performance rewards. Let’s clarify here that the reward is something additional, something other than the salary that has been agreed as the going rate for the job.

Without reading “Punished by Bounties” it might be hard to appreciate Alfie’s point, but let me give you an example from the book. Alfie tells us a story about a scheme sponsored by Pizza Hut in North America to encourage children to read. He tells us that to encourage literacy, the children were promised a pizza for every book they read.

On the surface it sounds perfectly laudable until you examine the details of what actually happened. These children, instead of being encouraged to read, now saw books as obstacles between themselves and a pizza, and that the obstacle had to be overcome as quickly and with as little effort as possible. So instead of finding joy in the act of reading, the books these kids read were selected by them based on how skinny they were and the size of the font so they could qualify for their free pizzas as quickly as possible.

As Alfie points out, instead of encouraging children to develop an interest in books, this program produced “fat kids who couldn’t read.” In the first five chapters of this book, Alfie Kohn turns our understanding of what is accepted as a basic tenet of our management practice on its head. He does it with such amazing logic that it’s impossible not to understand, and while his background is primarily in education, his background as a behaviorist means that the lessons he learned in the field of education are surgically relevant wherever we find one group of people trying to make another group of people work harder. He goes on to show us in a hundred different ways, through stories and examples, how what we assume was a way to get people to perform actually has the complete opposite effect.

Alfie tells a brilliant story to illustrate the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the effect one has on the other, in the case of an elderly man who lived across the road from a local school in the United States. The children had taken it upon themselves to stop in front of his house to insult him, knowing that he could not chase them.

But the old man had a plan. One day he called the children and asked if they would come back the next day to abuse him again if he paid them a dollar each. The kids were delighted and duly showed up the next day to earn their dollar, spending the afternoon hurling more insults at the man. The man waited until they were done and then apologized that he could only pay them 50 cents for the same thing the next day. The kids agreed that fifty cents would be fine, so they came back the next day. Again the old man waited until they were done and then apologized again, tomorrow he could only give them 10 cents each.

At this, the children frowned and refused to abuse him further.

The old man had taken something these kids clearly enjoyed and by rewarding them for doing it, he completely changed the way they felt about what they were doing until they wouldn’t even consider doing it unless they were paid. By rewarding them with an Extrinsic Motivator, he had robbed them of their joy, their Intrinsic Motivator. Alfie shows us how managers do the exact same thing to their employees every time they try to influence performance by giving them rewards. But they still do it because they don’t know any other way to influence the performance of their workers. This is as the world reels under the current crisis caused by bankers who were blinded to the long-term effects of their financial strategies by their pursuit of short-term individual rewards.

If you don’t read this book, you’ll be able to continue rewarding performance knowing that what you’re doing is improving the performance of your workforce. If you consider reading this book, be prepared to find out that almost everything you once thought of as good management practice is not.