Carrots and Sticks
Rewards or Punishments in Team Performance
The New York Times’ The Athletic ran a recent feature about an NHL team, the Nashville Predators, that’s worth a read. The gist is that the team had bought the players and the staff tickets to see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas. But, following an All-Star break, the team lost three games in a row. Frustrated that they’d played so badly, and they hadn’t improved following a verbal chastisement, the team’s General Manager Barry Trotz decided to cancel everyone’s going to the concert and a related road trip—just two days before they were to go. So instead of singing along with Bono and the rest of the band, everyone had to spend a day practicing at home before going back out on the road.
The GM and coach knew that the drastic measure would hurt the players and staff alike. And they also were aware that the canceled trip would either motivate the team or backfire.
The Predators went on an 18-game point streak, and the team made it to the NHL playoffs.
So let’s do some conjecture on why the GM and coach’s gamble in Vegas paid off and how we might fare if we tried a similar tactic.
Was It Punishment?
One quote in the piece stuck out to me. During the interview, Trotz explained,
“I know everybody looked at it as though I just punished them. I didn’t punish them. I just said, ‘This is the standard we have, this is not acceptable, and you have to start acting like professionals. Because the way you’re playing is not fair to each other, isn’t fair to the organization and, most of all, isn’t fair to your fans.’ I said, ‘You earn respect and you earn privilege, and right now you haven’t earned the right to have fun in Vegas, so we’re coming home from St. Louis.’”
There’s a fascinating new study, just published last month, on how punishment impacts elite team performance—measured by refs issuing yellow cards—on 412 players in England’s Premier League.
First things first: What is punishment? Particularly since Trotz said that’s not what he was doing.
As the study’s scholars explained, punishment is “presentation of an aversive event or the removal of a positive event following a behavior with the intention of decreasing the frequency of that behavior.” It can mean facing an aversive event or simply losing positive outcomes, such that, “To illustrate, the punishment could be in the form of a privilege denial, promotion denial, or bonus denial.”
Punishment is also social: It affects an entire organization, not just the individuals who are directly impacted.
In this framework, Trotz obviously did punish everyone.
Quick Shots
As one recent German study found, there wasn’t much difference between team athletes’ performance in cooperative tasks and competitive tasks; they were doing both at the same time. While individual athletes did see more of a difference; if they were competing, they weren’t cooperating.
Meanwhile in Portugal, professional athletes who were more task-oriented were more cooperative with their teammates than those who were more focused on their egos.
Civility—or the lack thereof—is a shared property of a team, and it’s important to remember that—even if the teammates don’t technically have the authority to punish a teammate—the boss isn’t the only one who can be aggressive (i.e. punish) them.
Carrots and Sticks
In economic experiments, some researchers have concluded that a few of us only punish and never reward. But most of us start out rewarding people for performance. We want to reward, be nice guys, and we believe that rewards are more effective motivators.
Then, we encounter freeloaders, those who just aren’t cutting it. And then, some of us rewarders reluctantly turn to punishment, while others stick with only a reward structure.
According to these scientists, the hybrid of “first reward, then punish,” may be the most effective technique to motivate performance because it is “surprisingly successful” in galvanizing cooperation. Further, the hybrid approach catalyzes cooperation with others in ways that can’t be predicted by rewards or punishment alone.
These researchers suggest that leaders might want to reward people as they implement a new policy, standard, etc., but once it’s the norm punish those who fail to meet that standard. (Trotz for the Win!)
How Punishment Impacts Individual Elite Soccer Players’ Performance
The Premier League researchers found that players who get more yellow cards than their teammates subsequently put out more effort than their teammates. They literally run more. But their increased effort doesn’t get them anything. Instead, their performance is worse than their teammates.
According to the researchers, the punished teammate is trying to avoid future punishment, but they are doing so in ineffective ways.
The research team also concluded that when teammates get more, or less, punishment than teammates, they do worse. When they do improve is when their punishment is about the same as everyone else’s. And that’s when the organization benefits from their increased effort.
The scholars also cautioned that managers shouldn’t punish everyone, including those who don’t deserve it, just to be equal.
So it could be that the reason why the global punishment worked for the Predators is that there was enough evidence that everyone was falling short. Therefore, a universal punishment worked to address a universal shortcoming.
However, think of what could have happened if even a couple of the Predators’ athletes—or staff—had rejected the idea that they’d personally failed. The locker room could have become about finger-pointing rather than team-building, and, in that situation, I think the idea would have backfired.
In Your Sight
If you’re thinking if you should try this at home, a couple questions to ponder….
If your organization is struggling with team culture, has it failed to live up to the standards set, or had it failed to set up standards?
Remember that adding a negative or removing a positive can both constitute a form of punishment.
If everyone is being punished equally, they better all deserve it. And the flip side:
If they all deserve it, they should be punished equally.
The team needs to appreciate that they, individually and collectively, have fallen short.
Re-think a universal punishment if teammates are likely to believe that others are more/less culpable than they.
Ask yourself how to frame the situation in such a way that everyone should have some ownership of the situation.
A Sherwood Update/Extra: A Real-Life Nocebo in the Wild
As I think all of you in the Band know, I’m fascinated by placebos and nocebos (placebos’ sort of evil twin). Well, last week, I had a whopper of a nocebo effect.
I went to a new dentist to get replacements for some fairly ancient filings. The dentist made a couple weird jokes, including the fact that they wanted to work on the right side first because “I’m right-handed.”
I left the dentist’s and, once the anesthetic wore off, I was having a progressively worse ache at my left tooth. When I woke up the next morning, the pain radiated from my jaw up to the base of my eye socket. I felt something wrong and was furious. Went back to the dentist demanding to be seen by the supervisor.
Suddenly, I had tears rolling down my face. I mumbled through them and dentist gadgetry that I’d had two friends die in the past two weeks and I did not have time for this nonsense with my teeth.
After I explained what had happened, the supervising dentist did a tad bit of work, but said, sympathetically, that he was sure I’d be sore for a day or two. But the tooth was fine. And maybe, he proffered gently, it was the power of suggestion. The other dentist had implied they weren’t able to do as good a job on that tooth (even though it was an attempt at a joke), and my brain believed it.
A couple days later, and I was still sore—it did really hurt. But it started hurting less. Immediately. Even as I left the office, I was shaking my head.
I’ve been wondering if I was more susceptible to a nocebo due to my emotional state, just as stress or loneliness can affect someone’s immune system. Honestly don’t know, but I’m still pondering that.
There’s one other thing that I am just fascinated by which is why I thought this was worth sharing. If you’d asked me to guess my reaction to a kind doctor’s “This is in your head” diagnosis, I’m sure I insisted that I would be beyond mortified.
But I wasn’t. Not for even a second. I know enough about the incredible power of nocebos that, as soon as he said it, I just nodded. I was so zen hearing it, it was as if he said that I had any other medical condition, like saying I had rickets because of insufficient calcium, and I’d answered, “Oh, of course. That makes sense. I’ll go get some.”
So the antidote to a pain in my head—that was almost all in my head—turned out to be other information already in my head.