On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.

By S. Kerr. 1975

Subfields: Economics & Operations Research, Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

Alignment of Language Agents (2021, background): “Society, organizations and firms are notorious for making the mistake of rewarding A, while hoping for B (Kerr, 1975), and AI systems are no exception (Krakovna et al., 2020b; Lehman et al., 2020).”
Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (2016, background): “Kerr (1975) explains several examples of value misalignment in this context.”
Changing Practice on Sustainability: Understanding and Overcoming the Organizational and Psychological Barriers to Action (2007, background): “Where a company may claim to hold sustainability as important in its mission statements, misaligned reward systems can lead individual managers toward fulfilling immediate personal goals that diverge from the broader, long-range goals of the sustainable organization (Kerr, 1995).”
Happiness, Health, or Relationships? Managerial Practices and Employee Well-Being Tradeoffs (2007, background): “The basic logic is as follows (see Kerr, 1975): managers hope for teamwork, but reward individual effort.”
Do you get what you pay for? Sales incentives and implications for motivation and changes in turnover intention and work effort (2016, background): “Such unintended effects of variable PFP plans have been observed elsewhere (e.g., Cox 2005; Kerr 1975; Pfeffer 1998).”
Academic Staff Workloads and Job Satisfaction: Expectations and values in academe (2006, background): “Nearly 30 years ago, Kerr (1975) noted that ‘‘Society hopes that [university] teachers will not neglect their teaching responsibilities but rewards them almost entirely for research and publications … Consequently it is rational for university teachers to concentrate on research, even to the…”
An examination of the curvilinear relationship between leader–member exchange and intent to turnover (2005, unknown): “, increasing visibility and sharing social networks) that work against them, akin to the 'folly of rewarding A while hoping for B' (Kerr, 1975).”
Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey (2012, background): “It is the classic folly of “rewarding A while hoping for B” (Kerr, 1975).”
Let the evidence speak again! Financial incentives are more effective than we thought (2015, background): “Incomplete measures occur partly because of what Kerr (1975) describes as a fascination with the objective criterion.”
Antecedents and Consequences of Goal Incongruity on New Product Development in Five Countries: A Marketing View (2003, background): “Employees tend to focus on activities they believe will be rewarded [40].”