How Did The Scanlon Plan Develop Employee Motivation

The Scanlon Plan needed commitment and perseverance from leadership and the employees to remain successful and accomplish its goal. When the company first introduced the Scanlon Plan, it was having prodigious results, but the benefits began to fade and the employee morale began to weaken. This lead to low productivity, the result of curtailed employee motivation. The Scanlon Plan was a quick fix that Bent and Haley relied heavily upon and eventually they could not keep up with the bonus program.

Engstrom continued to use the Scanlon Plan to attempt to increase productivity and motivation by providing monetary incentives during the downturn to increase quality of products and increase the drive in the employees (morale, emotions, and intrinsic drives), but inattentively did not take into account the needs and desires of the workforce as a whole. The Scanlon Plan did not continue to develop, instead it stayed in one place without further cultivation.
The Scanlon Plan was influenced by many factors including overtime, product returns, length of the month, and sales mix. A low Scanlon bonus could be rewarded following a month of record high sales and production. The employees stopped taking interest in the company resulting in a loss of trust and the loss of supervisor-employee
Workers accused management of creating a “moving carrot” despite management’s explanations of reductions (Beer & Collins, 2008). Bent and Hayley released 46 employees out of the 255 employee’s mid-2006 and caused further disruption within the employee workforce. The employees worked at different levels and experienced low morale within their pay grade, management lost its enticement by providing rewards that were unfailingly fluctuating causing distress among employees, and Bent and Hayley could not come up with a solution swift enough to fix the problems at