Why Rewards?

While studying today, I remember one one my previous readings from a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.

The book is about civilizations. An explanation of possible reasons of why some societies did grow faster and some didn't.

Quote from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
The prologue to the book opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

There is no clear answer given in the book, but you can answer the question by looking to the environmental force and demand. Where Europeans in order to be Physiological secured had to build strong houses. On the other side of the world where climate was not demanding strong houses, people could survive and live without thinking of building strong houses. The same goes for safety and other needs.

By looking at Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, I can realize how people's needs do format the society and by taking this concept to the organization we do see the same concept again.

Based on the above mentioned pattern, we can link several concepts captured from this unit and the forum posts to each other which they do impact the overall implementation of a successful organization reward system.

We do spend energy without expectation either because of self pleasure (inner-rewards) or as learned from ancestors (habit) like the monkeys did.

When a need is satisfied by our energy then we do expect reward.

Conceptually,
We wash our hands to reward health to ourselves.
We cook to reward food to ourselves.
We work to reward comfort to ourselves and enable growth.

"We do a certain task to satisfy a need and get respective reward out of it. "

Let's look at an organization where the top management is not motivated! Consecutively the administration will not be motivated and we can expect everything to become a mess in that organization.

The reward system is always expected from the top to down (management to employee) and (father to kid).
This shows the importance of a high pay to CEO's in organizations and it also answers the overall economic growth in countries like US where special attention is paid to management.

By taking a look at the equity theory and the continuous change of needs within an organization and external factors that impact equity, I do see a strong necessity for an "adaptive rewards system" based on a tailored framework for organizations where industry, organization size and regional culture along with current status are the main modifiers.

A reward system should spirally grow and mainly requires strong leadership skills.