| Comment Number: | OL-10508797 |
| Received: | 3/15/2005 10:48:54 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
CONTINUATION OF COMMENTS In addition, as individuals at a base under a performance-based prototype, we have to make our general comments which are listed below (continued from OL-10508783 and OL-10508766) - If incentives are geared toward individual achievement, rather than organizational achievement, there can be backstabbing and vicious competition among employees. This can hurt in situations where collaboration, teamwork and information sharing in a work group are crucial to good performance. If rewards are given to individuals, people have an incentive to keep information to themselves--such as tricks of the trade, advice, or informal mentoring--to themselves. People even have an incentive to make co-workers look bad compared to themselves. (This has been seen here, and I'm sure at other Acq Demo bases.) - These pay-for-performance systems increase incentives to play office politics, which is an unconstructive waste of time. Additionally, we have seen that supervisors here in charge of judging employee performance have a natural tendency to favor people like themselves. This can result in bias against individuals based on gender, age, race, etc. - These extrinsic rewards are seen as controlling and have been shown to have a countervailing negative effect on the behavior of people who are intrinsically motivated to perform. For the highly intrinsically motivated, the de-motivating effects of the modest extrinsic rewards supervisors had available outweighed their incentive effects. In fact, a study done at England's Sussex University concluded that offering pay for performance "does more to demotivate the majority of average-performing employees and does little to enhance the motivation of the top 5 percent who are likely to perform well in any case." While to idea of merit rating is alluring, the effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise. Everyone propels himself forward, or tries to, for his own good and the organization becomes the loser. (Again, this has been seen here in our demonstration project.) - What about the cost to set up NSPS? These performance based systems are expensive to design, set-up, and implement. With our serious DoD funding shortage, this is a lot of money. Additionally, the additional time demanded of pay pool representatives and managers uses up a lot of time that these people don’t have. When we set up Acq Demo, work was falling behind everywhere. Can DoD afford this? - Another cost aspect from our demonstration project, it takes at least 8 to 16 hours per year for each employee to prepare his or her part of the evaluation form. Then, there may be one or more additional meetings between the employee and supervision to finalize the performance review. All this has to happen before the supervisors and managers become part of the pay-pool discussions mentioned above. - W. Edwards Demming’s 1986 classic, "Out of Crisis" lists performance-based evaluation as one of the seven deadly diseases in American business. Have any of the folks setting up NSPS read this? Submitted by Edwards AFB, CA, Acquisition Demonstration Project Employees: Sonia LeDuc, Cathy Poplett, Edie Morris, John Poplett, Larry LeDuc, Deborah Thompson, Kathy Powell MORE IN ANOTHER SUBMITTAL - RECEIVED RUNTIME ERROR ON ATTEMPT TO ATTACH FILE