A13. “Employers can best motivate employees not through raises and bonuses but rather by offering non-monetary highly-publicized awards for high performance (e.g., employee-of-the-month awards, special parking spaces, personal letters from management, etc.).”
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.
It is an issue of controversial that by which way should an employer motivates its employees. Different people with various backgrounds and experiences have difference perspectives. Some people hold that the employer should motivate its employees through raises and bonuses. However, others contend that employer can offer employees some non-monetary highly publicized awards for high performance. As far as I am concerned, I choose the opinion of the former group of people. The reasons are illustrated as follows.
First, monetary motivation such as raises and bonuses are the most realistic and direct ways. Different people have different desires. Most of the people in the society will take money as a more realistic way because it can buy anything while a reward may just be a reputation. For example, in our company, most of the employees with good performance, when asked to make a choice between monetary bonus and non-monetary awards, they chose the former one without hesitation. Because they think that they can use the money to buy something they want. But a reward is just a reputation with less value.
Second, monetary awards are easy to measure. In most of the business, the bonuses and raises are in positive proportion to the performance. For instance, I have a friend who works as a salesman. As per his advise, his company carefully calculates the bonus each year so that it can clearly reflect the sales performance of each salesman. Each salesman has a clear picture and number in mind of his own sales objective and makes every effort to achieve it. If all the people know that the rewards for their performance is the same non-monetary awards, no one will have motivation to proper the overall sales.
Admittedly, we cannot desire that some non-monetary awards such as publicized-awards and letter of management are sometimes valuable and helpful if the staffs want to have a job-hop or have a higher position in the community.
To sum, I support that raises and bonuses as monetary awards are more realistic and are more easily to calculate so that both a business and its employees can strictly follow it and take it as an efficient measure to proper the business.
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