Is a Meritocracy Demotivating?
In business terms, a meritocracy is a great leap forward from command-and-control, promoting people as it does on the basis of their intelligence and effort.
But just as 'free trade' is rarely free, the reality of a merit-driven hierarchy doesn't quite live up to the ideal, argues the London Business School's Nigel Nicholson in this Harvard Business Review post
As he sees it, there are three main drawbacks:
- People's skills and abilities are assumed to be unchangeable -- alphas always come first, omegas last. It fails to recognise a person's capacity for improvement.
- The only way is up -- "in the corporate realm, we demand men and women for all seasons", as Nicholson says, rather than recognising 'horses for courses' -- leaders who are better in a crisis, the value of specialisms, etc.
- In larger, data-driven organisations or where 'systems' and processes take over, people can be pigeon-holed or stereotyped -- for good or ill. The stars remain stars, the disappointments lose traction. The corporate pyramid can only accommodate a certain number at the top, after all.
But is this the fault of the system or of a business itself?
Meritocracy's supporters would argue:
- It acknowledges varying degrees of individual ambition and drive -- not everyone wants the kind of accountability or responsibility that goes with being in charge. Your only limits to progression are self-made.
- It sets objectives that translate to different cultures -- the idea that smart, hard-working people are rewarded is understandable in any culture and is inherently fair.
- It's democratic - by codifying objectives and rewards, a company offers a transparent career path that's less reliant on the whim of one (possibly biased) boss. People can chart their own course through the company, and externally, and will be galvanised to help team-mates progress if that helps them reach their goal, too.
As with most things, there's probably something in between, a way of marrying what law firm Wragge & Co calls "a caring meritocracy" with a more flexible management hierarchy.
Enlightened bosses will already recognise that individuals are less inclined to teamwork if they're looking after number one; that promotion and progression alone may not be enough to sustain individual motivation; that 'knowledge workers' may not want to be promoted away from their area of expertise.
But the kind of change a company would have to undergo to ditch meritocracy altogether is too radical for most to contemplate. However persuasive the flexible, "lattice" style of management of W L Gore, or even the employee-owned structure of John Lewis Group or Tullis Russell -- the cultural shift's too daunting.
But it may be possible for managers to sneak some changes in via flexible working. Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Off-Ramps and On-Ramps" predicted that the need to accomodate mothers returning to work would drive the creation of a 'two-speed' career path, where lateral moves would be as valued as equal to upward ones, and quality of work would replace 'time served' as a measure of individual effort. It's still a meritocracy though. It's just there's a different measure for merits.