Sage words from Peter Cappelli director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of Business, writing on HRE online.
Extraordinarily callous and inept management, combined with huge rewards for success and incentives for hiding failure, are some of the typical attitudes exhibited by financial institutions, many of which have been collapsing.
. . . . If there is anything good that comes out of the crushing failures of these investment institutions, it should be to question seriously the notion that rewards for individual performance are a substitute for good employee management.
Sadly companies seem fixated on paying for short term individual performance and do not seem able to change their management style. We have been here before in 1974, 1987, 2001 and now this biggee. Remember compensation committees are driven by the consultancies who are very short term earners.