Abstract
Nowadays, in any company, there are three main groups of people involved, who all have different objectives for the business: the owners, managers and employees. Employees' objectives basically include firm's survival which is a priority as their jobs are at stake according to the stability of the business. Nevertheless, most employees are very concerned with their own salary level, depending on the firm's performance which can decide to run an incentive scheme. By definition, an incentive scheme is a formal program used to promote or encourage specific actions or behavior by a specific audience during a defined period of time.
In concrete terms, a reward is presented to the worker after the occurrence of an action with the intent to cause the behavior to occur again, by associating positive meaning to the behavior (Wikipedia – motivation). In the first part, we will look closer at the different changes in management styles, from the view of the Classical School to the theory of the Human Relation School. Then, we will see if those tends has brought any progress by analyzing workers behavior facing those schemes.
Since the 20th century, many companies have realized that motivation was a key factor to enhance productivity throughout new social organizations on the workplace based on social and psychological schemes.
