AI-72， 下周考试了，刚刚练笔

我一直都是在看作文，看帖子上别人写的和作文224篇。到今天才鼓起勇气来自己练笔，因为还有4天就要考试了。写作文是我从小到大都深恶痛绝的事情。自己开练了才发现自己写和看不是一回事。这是我第三篇，比前两篇强多了，也因为题目比较好写吧。才敢拿上来给大家批，帮忙狠狠地批吧，我受得了，没事。

72. “Companies should not try to improve employees’ performance by giving incentives — for example, awards or gifts. These incentives encourage negative kinds of behavior instead of encouraging a genuine interest in doing the work well.”

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Someone argues that companies should not use the incentives such as awards or gifts in order to improve employees’ performance. Such incentive would bring negative consequence that discourage employees from showing their genuine interest in doing the job well. However, giving incentives to employees does not necessarily result in a decrease in employee’s genuine interest. After all, incentives could do more good than harm.

The first argument can be presented to support this point of view is that employees do need incentives in the aim of improving their performance. The bonus given for sales person could be a good example here. The sales person can earn certain percentage of bonus when the total sales exceed certain predetermined figure. Under this incentive, the sales person has strong incentive to improve the performance so as to increase the total sales. In return, the company also benefits from the increased sales.

In addition, another reason for the statement is that giving incentives also represents an honor for employees. For example, the company I used to work anually gave the best five employee free travelling package. The ones who earned the gift not only felt excited for obtaining the free gift, but also felt honored and won respect from other employees. As a result, all employees are better motivated to work harder under such honor incentive.

Admittedly, it may be true that sometimes the moneytary incentive could shift the employee’s focus from the pure work interest to the pure rewards. However, not all job needs the inherent interest from its employees. For example, the workers at the assembly line mostly work for the financial aim instead of the job interest. If they could get even higher payment by improving their performance, they would be motivated to do so. On the other hand, for those who have inherent interest towards their job such as a reseacher, the moneytary incentive does no harm for them. After all, everyone needs financial support for their life and their family, researchers can maintain their genuine interest towards the nature of the job and in the mean time get extra benefit from their good performance.