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The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation.
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Contrary to common sense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking.
The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what th...
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Compelling people in an organisation to focus their efforts on a narrow range of measurable features degrades the experience of work. Subject to performance metrics, people are forced to focus on limited goals, imposed by others who might not understand the work that they do.
Mental stimul...
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More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: metric fixation. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired ...
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When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures,...
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43 reads
Large-scale organisations of our society are the poorer for driving out staff most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.
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The rewards of the metric performance measurement can be as a form of a monetary bonus, stocks or just an enhanced grade or designation, leading to competition among employees. This leads to many employees gaming the system to affect the bottom line of their metrics.
Ex...
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