ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how people respond to incentive schemes in practice. It investigates the impact of the bonus arrangements through senior managers’ accounts of what guides their daily decisions, and their experience of the incentive and performance management processes. The chapter explores three elements of incentive arrangements: the performance agreement, the performance evaluation and the financial bonus itself. It examines the claim that safety is special, being a fundamental value that managers hold, and that financial bonuses are therefore unnecessary as a means of encouraging safety-conscious decision making. A key aspect of the incentive arrangement is the performance evaluation, which most often involves a one-on-one discussion between a supervisor and an employee about their performance over the previous 6 or 12 months. The chapter explains that the performance evaluation does not turn on the performance agreement itself. Rather, it is a qualitative judgement of overall performance.
