Project Team Rewards
Literature Review
20
the topic. Maybe they think the audience is too small to put any effort in researching
project team rewards.
As shown in Table 2 (p. 7), there are different options on whom to reward in teamwork.
Table 7 (p. 21) shows advantages and disadvantages of rewarding the team or individuals.
The list makes it
clear that there are good arguments for both, rewarding teams and
rewarding individuals. The decision of whom to reward in teamwork is mainly influenced
by the team characteristics: team composition, team size, and the team’s stage of
development (Parast & Adams 2004). For instance, a team composed of individualists is
not suitable for team rewards (DeMatteo 1997). Small teams are more suitable for team
rewards than big teams because in small teams the team reward is easier to distribute
(Harrison 2002). Different rewards to support the team development are required,
depending on the development stage a team currently is in (forming, storming, norming,
performing, adjourning) (Coil and Frohman 1994 in Armstrong 2000). In addition, team
members’ age and organisational culture are of significant relevance. DeMatteo (1997)
found out that older
employees are less likely to like team rewards than younger
employees are. He assumes this is because older employees tend to be more change
resistant. According to Gale (2004), an organisation with a friendly and cooperative
culture should prefer team-based rewards. An aggressive and very competitive culture
demands individual rewards.
Problematic with these findings is that they all are vague, and focus on one factor only.
For instance, there are no exact numbers from which age on employees do not like group
rewards and how strong their resistance is. It is also not clear whom to reward in a team
consisting of young and old employees. In addition, it is not clear what to do if two factors
are contradicting. For instance whom to reward in a team consisting of old employees in a
cooperative organisational culture. There probably cannot be any exact numbers because
the basic idea of the modest reward proponents is that all individuals are different and
therefore have different preferences about rewards. However, this makes finding a specific
reward answer difficult.
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