Does the carrot and stick approach of motivating employees really work? Yes,says a new study which found that rewarding good behaviour is equally as effective as punishing bad. The University of British Columbia study found that both rebuking the bad and rewarding the good are equally effective in encouraging people to cooperate. "A shame tactic can be effective,but rather surprisingly,we have also found that apparently honour has an equally strong effect on encouraging people to cooperate for the common good," study researcher Christoph Hauert was quoted as saying by LiveScience. The results are important in an era when shame and honour are used to institute change in business and personal behaviour,the researchers said. Shame and honour campaigns are common on social media sites,with users tipping hats and wagging fingers at companies,media outlets and other figures,said study author Jennifer Jacquet,a postdoctoral researcher at UBC. In government,some states post the names of tax delinquents online in an effort to shame them. And conservation campaigns often hinge on companies striving for the equivalent of gold stars,such as labels declaring their products "sustainable." To measure the effects of shame and honour,the researchers started by giving 180 undergraduate students USD 12 apiece. In groups of six,the volunteers played a game in which they had to decide 12 times whether to contribute a dollar to a public pot,the total of which would then be doubled and redistributed equally to all players,regardless of whether they'd contributed. The temptation might be to freeload on other players,by keeping the original USD 12 and raking in others' donations. But the researchers added a twist to some of the games: Players were told that at the end of 10 rounds,two of the six players would have to reveal their identities. In some games,the two most generous players would be revealed (and thus honoured). In other games,the least generous players would be revealed (and thus shamed). Both the threat to shame and the promise of honour increased generosity by 50 per cent,the researchers found. In those games,the public fund received USD 33 on average,compared with USD 22 in the no-shame,no-honour games.
