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Business
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Bartleby
巴托比专栏
The gelignite of incentives
激励的炸药
When workplace bonuses backfire.
当工作奖金适得其反。
“If you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes.”
“如果你的激励机制很愚蠢，那么你得到的结果也会很愚蠢。”
The late Charlie Munger was endlessly quotable, but this pearl of pith from the famed investor is one that every manager should remember.
已故的查理·芒格有无数的名言警句，但这位著名投资者的这句简练名言是每一位管理者都应该记住的。
There are plenty of dumb examples to choose from.
有很多愚蠢的例子可供选择。
Some are apocryphal: the Soviet nail factory that produced a single, uselessly gigantic nail to meet its tonnage quota.
有些是杜撰的：苏联的一家钉子工厂生产了一枚毫无用处的巨型钉子，只为了达到吨位配额。
Others are not.
其他例子不是杜撰的。
Wells Fargo, a previously well-regarded American retail bank, was notoriously embroiled in scandal after blunt cross-selling targets pushed its employees to open unauthorised deposit accounts and issue unwanted debit cards.
富国银行（一家曾经备受赞誉的美国零售银行）曾深陷丑闻，因为其简单粗暴的交叉销售目标迫使员工开设未经授权的存款账户和发放不必要的借记卡。
Silly financial incentives in health-care systems can help explain everything from once-elevated rates of Caesarean-section births in Iran to woefully inadequate dental treatment in Britain.
医疗保健系统中愚蠢的经济激励措施可以解释一切问题，从伊朗曾经升高的剖腹产率到英国严重不足的牙科治疗。
The trouble is that it is not always easy to work out what dumb looks like.
问题在于，要弄清楚什么是愚蠢并不总是容易的。
A study published in 2017 by David Atkin of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and his co-authors found that many football manufacturers in Sialkot, Pakistan were oddly slow to adopt a new technology that reduced the amount of synthetic leather wasted during their production.
麻省理工学院的大卫·阿特金及其合著者在2017年发表的一项研究发现，巴基斯坦锡亚尔科特的许多足球制造商奇怪地迟迟没有采用一项新技术，该技术可以减少生产过程中浪费的合成皮革数量。
The reason?
原因是什么？
Workers who were paid by the ball were not keen to spend time that could otherwise have been used to earn money on learning new techniques.
按件计酬的工人并不热衷于把原本可以用来挣钱的时间花在学习新技术上。
In theory, a piece-work incentive scheme makes perfect sense for this kind of repetitive activity; in practice, it was the firm that paid their workers by the hour which quickly embraced the new technology.
从理论上讲，对于这种重复性工作，计件激励是完全合理的；但在实践中，按工时给工人支付工资的公司反而迅速采用了新技术。
A couple of recent studies underline the risk that incentives will have unintended consequences.
最近的一些研究强调了激励措施可能产生意想不到的后果的风险。
One, from Jakob Altifian and Dirk Sliwka of the University of Cologne and Timo Vogelsang of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, tested the effect of paying an attendance bonus on levels of absenteeism.
其中一项研究，科隆大学的雅各布·阿尔蒂菲安和德克·施利夫卡以及法兰克福金融管理学院的蒂莫·沃格尔桑测试了支付出勤奖金对缺勤水平的影响。
They did so by randomly assigning apprentice workers at a German retailer to two groups which offered a financial reward or some extra holiday, respectively, for a perfect attendance record.
他们的测试方法是将德国一家零售商的学徒工人随机分配到两个小组，一个小组为全勤记录提供金钱奖励，另一个小组为全勤记录提供一些额外假期。
Neither reward reduced absenteeism, and the monetary bonus had precisely the opposite effect: it actually increased rates of absenteeism by 50% on average.
两种奖励都没有减少旷工现象，而且金钱奖励产生了完全相反的效果：实际上它使旷工率平均增加了50%。
To work out what was going on the researchers surveyed employees after the experiment had ended.
为了弄清楚发生了什么，研究人员在实验结束后对员工进行了调查。
They found that the introduction of a bonus shifted workers’ perceptions of what counted as acceptable behaviour.
他们发现，引入奖金制度改变了员工对可接受行为的看法。
The message that attendance warranted a reward made people feel less obliged to come in and less guilty if they threw a sickie.
出勤值得奖励的信息让人们觉得来上班的义务感降低了，如果他们请病假，也会觉得内疚感减少了。
The effect was particularly pronounced for the most recently hired employees, and higher rates of absenteeism persisted even after the bonus had been removed.
这种影响对于新入职员工尤为明显，即使在奖金取消后，缺勤率仍然较高。
The power of incentives to change social norms can be helpful: an attendance bonus has been shown to work in circumstances where widespread absenteeism is a real problem.
用激励改变社会常态的力量可能是有帮助的：在普遍旷工是一个真正问题的情况下，出勤奖金已被证明是有效的。
But the starting-point matters.
但初始情况很重要。
A second study, by Luan Yingyue and Kim Yeun Joon of the Cambridge Judge Business School, tested the effects of making co-operativeness a formal job requirement.
第二项研究由剑桥大学贾奇商学院的栾颖月和金允俊进行，测试了将合作能力作为正式工作要求的效果。
Expectations of being helpful to colleagues were added to the job descriptions and performance appraisals of engineers working in a research-and-development (R&D) centre at a chemicals company in East Asia.
在东亚一家化工公司的研发中心工作的工程师职位描述和绩效评估中增加了为同事提供帮助的期望。
(A second R&D centre in the company acted as a control.)
（该公司的第二个研发中心充当了对照组。）
Surveys of affected employees found that the motivation to help changed once it was part of the job, from an intrinsic drive to be co-operative to a desire to show off to the higher-ups.
对受影响员工的调查发现，一旦帮助他人成为工作的一部分，他们的动机就会发生变化，从内在的合作动力转变为在上级面前表现的欲望。
The type of help that people offered their colleagues changed as a result: there were more frequent instances of helpful behaviour but the quality of assistance that people actually gave each other went down.
人们向同事提供帮助的类型也因此发生了变化：助人的行为更加频繁了，但人们实际给予彼此的帮助质量却下降了。
“How can I help as long as it doesn’t involve too much effort?” is a very watery form of collaboration.
“只要不费太多力气，我该怎样提供帮助？”是一种水分很大的合作形式。
These examples confirm both the wisdom of Munger’s aphorism and the difficulty of anticipating how incentives will play out.
这些例子既证实了芒格这句名言的智慧，也证实了预测激励措施将如何发挥作用的难度。
Dumbness may become apparent only over time, so pilot schemes and rigorous review processes are essential.
愚蠢可能只有随着时间的推移才会显现出来，因此试点计划和严格的审查程序是必不可少的。
As Stephan Meier, an academic at Columbia Business School, argues persuasively in “The Employee Advantage”, a new book, people are motivated by many more things than moolah.
正如哥伦比亚商学院的学者斯蒂芬·迈尔在新书《员工优势》中令人信服地论证的，能给人们提供动力的有很多东西，不仅仅是金钱。
Rewarding people for doing things they would anyway can easily backfire.
奖励人们去做他们反正本来都会做的事情很容易适得其反。
As Munger might have said, incentives should be approached like gelignite—with enormous care.
正如芒格可能说过的那样，人们对待激励措施应该像对待炸药一样——要极其谨慎。
