Rewards and benefits: what is the impact of competitive behaviour in the workplace?
Human are, by their very nature, culturally competitive beings: but what is the moral implication of success or failure in any competition in the workplace?
Addressing the early stage of the recruitment process within the hospitality industry, for example, one can observe permanent concerns in attracting quality and quantity of candidates. As a result, various reward systems appear, often taking the form of financial incentives or packages of additional benefits, such as paid time off, bonus structures or advancement opportunities.
The reward policy in any organisation should be designed to promote cooperative behaviour in an effort to avoid becoming subservient to the damaging effects of competition. As long as an incentive system is designed for individual performance-related pay, it will more likely than not meet its main purpose, even if it is just partially.
However, increasing performance, the volume of sales, or the desire to motivate employees can have numerous negative connotations, fragmenting the team. Cooperation between individuals might be replaced with rivalries. The carelessness towards the quality of output may eventually be felt by customers who will be experiencing poor quality of service. Managerial knowledge about competition must be shaped following a balanced empiricism of observation concerning both the competence and the efficiency of personnel.
Yet the true value of a person should result from acquiring personal satisfaction from the work that has been completed. Winning in a competition should not revolve around who is the first one to cross the finish line nor materialise into a raise in salary, as long as you know your endeavour has fulfilled you personally. The conceptual core of Stoicism teaches us that the only valuable things are those that no-one can take away from us. Personal satisfaction, respectively the true value of the individual, will never be removed; no-one has power over the work you have done.
Rewards in the hospitality industry that instigate competitive behaviour always follow a purpose that is of no moral significance. Let’s take, for example, a hotel that is understaffed and fails to forecast the right occupancy. When there are too many guests, the manager decides to offer a raise to the housekeeper that cleans the most rooms. One can observe here the emphasis put on the speed, so that the merit will be awarded to the fastest housekeeper. By excellence, character and moral attributes such as kindness or justice, will be placed in opposition to swiftness. If a housekeeper is fast, that will not make then any better as a person. Instead, the manager should focus on the bigger picture that involves cooperation.
Thus, in order to avoid the disdainful implications and the turpitudes stirred up by the spirit of competition, managers have to balance its destructive effects by facilitating cooperation between employees and taking measures in this direction.
The satisfaction of the customer is, ultimately, rendered by the quality of services provided by the employees working in hospitality and tourism.
Written by Ioana-Lavinia Bogos, BBA Global Hospitality Management at Les Roches.