Why Carrot-&-Stick is so Popular

The opprobrium heaped on the Carrot-and-Stick method is fascinating and foolish.
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The literature typically talks about this approach as something primitive, authoritarian and preferably to be overcome. It is usually used as a straw man to advance the enlightened handling of people. As examples: see McGregor's invention of Theory X v Theory Y, Maslow's creation of a hierarchy of needs, Likert's classification of patterns of management, and Mayo's interpretation of the Hawthorne experiments.

The present analysis takes a simple common-sense view. Carrot-and-stick is indeed relevant to influencing staff, and it always will be relevant. Like any useful tool, it can be overused, misused and abused: but that is a separate matter entirely.

Both the stronger and the weaker shapers of work behaviours depend on seniority of status and raise issues of fairness. Rewards and punishments are variably distributed and tend to be more public, so they raise fairness issues more acutely than praise and criticism.

Fairness, being ethical, links naturally to the framework of approaches to ethical choice-PH'6. These are used in the frameworks for politics, where they are summarized from Ch.6 of Working with Values.

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The issue here is not legitimist-PH'6L6, as might be expected based on its obligation to be fair, but rather about what «type of obligation» is relevant to rewarding and punishing in a fair way. In the organizational context (as in society generally), whether or not something is judged «fair» is primarily based on convention and acceptability. Any manager is constrained to reward and punish in an acceptable way. So the identity type required here is the conventionalist-PH'6L2.

Conventionalist choice is an extremely common identity type, and that is why, despite intense academic and social disapproval, «carrot and stick» management methods are used so widely.

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Originally posted: 20-Oct-2011