In every social setup, extending from a family to a cross-cultural and multinational organization, efforts are done to motivate the people or members to show better performance. The main aim of this strategy is to increase the individual output of the members and also establish an air of competition among the members to strive for enhanced performance and output. In order to make this happen, many techniques and strategies are used. In a family, where its different members especially the children are motivated to show acceptable behaviors or avoid unacceptable, many incentives and rewards are given in form of praises, small gifts or other ways of appreciation. When children see that their good deeds are appreciated and bad ones are discouraged, they try their best to come up with the acceptable ones and avoid the unacceptable. There develops a culture that promotes these ideas and takes them forward. In the same way, awards of ‘Employee of the Month’, salary bonuses, honorary trips, shields, certificates, promotions and many other incentives develop an air of competition among the employees of an organization to work with increased efficiency and show better performance.
In modern organizations, there works a separate department of HRM (Human Resource Management) that devises programs to motivate the employees to work for increased performance. This strategy has paid a lot to the organizations and thus organizations spend a lot of money for those programs that increase the performance of employees and these programs continue throughout the year.
Similarly, books of modern psychology guide the parents to motivate their children for being more successful and productive in life; be it at home or at school. It is due to the same principle that schools and educational institutes have devised the positions system and award trophies, medals and certificates to the students so that they should work hard to obtain these distinctions.
In business organizations, such programs have increased a lot to the overall efficiency of the organization and thus its overall performance has increased in the form of increased output and revenue. When such programs were not so much common, every employee of an organization worked in a routine manner and never extended any extra effort to add more to the output of the organization. In such a situation, the lazy employees always tried to work less while the hardworking employees got disappointed when they noticed that both the good and bad employees were treated in the same manner and slowly they also developed the habit of working less.
In today’s fast-paced world, there is not present any social setup that should be without any race or struggle for betterment. Every firm works to become the number one in its field. For this purpose, strategies are developed and are successfully implemented. If we take the automobile manufacturers, for instance, intense competition for acquiring more and more market share and becoming number one in the field never lets the companies to rely on their present situation and thus they work incessantly to bring better products, market it in the best possible manner and sell as many automobiles as possible. If a firm in the field fails to understand these trends, it would soon end up with complete failure and would be out of the game.
Same applies to the individuals that they try their best to be more successful and the criterion for being successful is to hold bigger post or position and have better income than the previous. In this regard, employees work hard to take lead from the co-workers or make a separate identity in the market.
More or less, same strategy is undertaken by the parents that they should earn more to keep their family happy. When it comes to the children, they have also developed a perception that they will be happy if they were more successful in their education or in their sports or other activities of their lives. It is the reason why, they take the fact very seriously that they should work hard to be more successful and as a result be happier.
Last year, I came through an interesting incident in this regard. A student of mine was very successful in school. He was a gifted child and had all the abilities that earned him success in every activity of the school. He was the position-holder among all the sections of his class, participated in all the curricular and extra-curricular activities and stunned the others by his superior performance. In such circumstances, he had developed a perception that he should be the best in every competition and should never let others take lead from him. To some extent, this perception can be positive but if it enters the extreme limits, it may turn out to be negative and may be problematic because every human being is gifted with different skills and quality and a single person cannot be the master of all the fields.
When he was not selected in a competition, he was found to be very much distressed. When a teacher cut his few marks in exam, he was found to be crying a lot. On another occasion, he had almost injured himself when he was dropped from an educational contest. His reaction on this occasion was so alarming that I felt that he badly needed some counseling in this regard. I called him and asked, ‘What would happen if you became successful?’ His response was immediate, ‘I would be happy’, ‘and do you think that only way of happiness is in success? I have seen a lot many students who are not as successful as you are but yet they appear to be very much happy because they have accepted it as a reality that being happy and being successful are two different things. If we attach our happiness with success in life, then we will struggle a lot because time and again, we will have to charge the battery of happiness with a success and in case if we could not provide it with a timely success, it might die immediately and in my opinion, it is not much rational because it is impossible that we should be successful every time and then there is no end for the demand of success, because after one success, we will have to look for another success and in actual life, success never comes too often and in this way, we risk of losing our happiness due to the lack of frequent successes. You should work hard, do your best and if you were successful, cherish every moment of it but if you were not successful, it should not snatch away your happiness because, in this way, you are putting your happiness on ransom.’
Same applies to all those who work so much for happiness that they forget the happiness in the pursuit of happiness and when the happiness comes to them, they are found much busy in looking for it here and there and it silently moves away. There are many businessmen and employees who work day and night to become successful so that they should be more happy but they get so much busy that they forget to differentiate between happiness and success. In the end, they end up as successful at the cost of losing all the joys and happiness of life. This disease is spreading widely and we should be aware of not becoming its next victim.