A key attribute for effective leadership calls for reinforcing and motivating others to promote superior performance. Financial and non-financial rewards can be applied for this purpose (Milkovich & Newman 2004). Numerous surveys done among employees working in private sectors indicated they value highly personalized rewards/recognition for a job well done as a critical dimension of their reward system (Armstrong & Stephens 2005). It has become imperative that employee recognition should be given more attention by leaders as they attempt to meet the retention and productivity challenges confronting today's organizations.
The competitive edge of modern-day business emerges from innovation or discovery of a high performance management system. A system that enhances efficiency, decreases cost or enhances quality confers immediate competitive advantage on its creator and sets a standard for the rest of the industry to follow. But once diffused across the field of competition, it becomes the standard. Now a new, yet more innovative, high performance system must be attained that once more creates competitive advantage for its inventors (Lawler 1995).
The history of industry since the mid- nineteenth century is traced through the uncovering and implementation of successively more sophisticated high performance systems. It commences with centralization of productive capacity in the modern factory system. Prior to the invention of factories, each community was a system of independent craftspeople and farmers who enjoyed an idyllic communal existence formed around specialization of craft. The factory system was the product of engineering temper and skill in a globally competitive world. The first high performance factory systems were devised around the disciplines of industrial engineering to exploit intercontinental commerce. Frederick Winslow Taylor created the high performance factory system that has been dubbed "scientific management" (Lawler 1995).
The complex and sometimes confused rhetoric of motivational theory provides an example of theory evolving in a disciplined, scientific way, arriving ultimately at a point where the ideologies of both quality of work life and worker participation are largely refuted. Out of the rigorous research on worker motivation has come modern goal-setting theory, which has already commenced to reform management practice. Emphasis on goals within a context of management by objectives and sound management strategy is emerging as a core element of modern high performance management systems (Lawler 1995).
Modern high performance systems appear to demand reemphasis on individual uniqueness and breadth of skill through broad-based multiskill training within a context of a robust and supportive work culture. Indeed, one of the best paths to high performance at the turn of the twenty-first century appears to be in orderly, purposeful construction of a high performance culture formed around the selected skills and attitudes of individual workers, augmented by intensive training within a high performance culture. Attention to relevant individual differences and to work group values is indispensable to creation of such a culture. Indeed, an argument for the necessity of discriminating good from poor potential workers probably turns on the individual's potential to the shape and quality of organization culture. Ultimately, the robustness of a culture is determined by the clarity, honesty and openness of its communications (Lawler 1995).
