CHAPTER 10

Even if incentives may play an important role when implementing scorecards - or in any other change program for that matter - we don't believe that incentives or reward mechanisms is a generic success factor. On the contrary, we have seen numerous situations where the incentive systems have been aligned with the organization's strategy and its goals, but where the employees still have behaved in other ways than the incentives encouraged. When asking the employees why they disregard such behaviour that would yield rewards, they often say that the incentive models are based on too simplistic, instrumental, perceptions of the workforce. The reason why they do what they do is not whether it results in one Euro more or less, but because they want to contribute to what they believe should be the organization's goals, they want to belong to the group or because they want to be true to their profession.

At this point, it may be important to stress that our practical experience from working with strategy and management control projects mostly comes from the Scandinavian countries, as do the majority of the cases in this book. Our attitude to financial rewards may differ from other writers. The attitude to remuneration and compensation differs greatly between countries, and our presentation is naturally grounded in a Scandinavian, approach to incentives and rewards, that at least until recently has de-emphasised financial gains as motivator.