On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.

Kerr, S. (1975). On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1975

Volume

18

Issue

4

Pages

769-783

DOI

10.5465/255378

DOI registrant

Academy of Management

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/255378

Cited from

economics_finance, organizational_management

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Goal Congruence (Alignment)
  • The most consequential alignment failures occur in multi-agent systems where individual rationality produces collective irrationality—the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, adverse-selection spirals—where unaligned incentives make globally optimal cooperation individually irrational
• Incentive
  • Absent this feedback into a deciding agent, the pattern is selection or reinforcement, not incentive. The proxy-attachment invariant. The payoff attaches to an observable proxy for the target; the population optimises the proxy, so proxy-gaming, crowding-out, and Goodhart drift are structural symptoms, not accidents.

    This sourceClassic catalogue of perverse incentives where payoff pinned to a measurable proxy rewards the wrong behavior — proxy-gaming, teaching-to-the-test, citation gaming.

Mechanisms

• Incentive Realignment
  • Its strength is that it removes the most stubborn kind of resistance — the rational kind — by making adoption locally sensible, and it exposes an uncomfortable truth many change efforts avoid: that the organization has been rewarding A while hoping for B.

    This sourceShows how organizational reward systems can pay off one behavior while leaders hope for another.

• Recognition System
  • Its central failure is misdirected reward — the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.

    This sourceIdentifies the recurring organizational folly of rewarding one behavior while hoping for a different behavior.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 4 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://doi.org/10.5465/255378 ×1

Registry ID ref:175969849438 · see in the full table