CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
An incentive is a form of financial encouragement recognizing a particular contribution made by the work force, in other words, it is a sum of money paid in addition to the basic rate which the organization pays to ensure that its most important production aspects are being optimized . For instance, a capital intensive company might have an incentive linked to machine utilization.
Performance incentives are payment made to an employee or group of employee based on amount of output. The use of performance incentive policies is premised on the belief that output can be measured and performance by workers, it used dated back to the era of the scientific management movement championed by Fedrick Winslow Taylor who argued passionately for the use of incentive wage system as a way of getting more output from the workers. It was also aimed at combating “soldering” or boondoggling” which was a practice of deliberate restriction of output by workers on the job as at that time. Taylor believe that workers could always exert greater efforts if they were to be paid a financial incentive based upon the number of units of work they were able to produce. He then developed the differential rate system which gives a worker a lesser piece rate e .g #1.0 per piece if he produced less than the standard amount of output required by so doing; individual workers are motivated to produce greater output.
In every organization, large or small private or public enterprises, human resources (employees) are always the pillar of the success of the organization. The human elements have their individual drives, desires, needs, wishes and similar forces which they intend to satisfy when they are coming into an organization. The satisfaction or non-satisfaction of these needs by the organization has an impact on the behaviour or performance of the employee and eventually on productivity.
The usefulness of good incentive policies which leads to motivation of the employee cannot be over emphasized. Every organization depends on motivation among other factors for the attainment of their objectives. The monetary incentives like bonuses, wages, salary increment, e t c to put more effort in their work which help to improve the level of productivity in both private and public industries.
Many a time, the most concern of employer is to make the employee to contribute to the attainment of organizational objectives, but they should know that if the employees are not happy with the management of the organization, there will be a very low rate of production in the organization, that is why Hekina and Jones (1967) page 120 visualize that employees should be seen and valued as assets for the allocation of organizational resources. This project will be based on the impact of management incentive policies on workers‟ productivity using Dangote cement factory obajana, kogi state as a case study.