What leaders usually conclude
The common explanation is a communication failure — the message did not travel far enough, or was not repeated often enough, and the fix is more communication. Steven Kerr’s research on reward systems, published in the Academy of Management Journal, points to a different and more durable explanation. Kerr examined organisations, including a manufacturing company, where the stated hope and the actual reward pointed in opposite directions, and found this pattern recurring across very different settings. His conclusion was direct: “Most organisms seek information concerning what activities are rewarded, and then seek to do (or at least pretend to do) those things, often to the virtual exclusion of activities not rewarded.” A production floor that continues to prioritise volume after leadership has announced a priority on quality is not failing to understand the new message — it is responding, rationally, to whichever measure still determines shift performance ratings, bonus payouts, or supervisor praise, none of which may have actually changed to reflect the new stated priority.
It is worth noting how consistent this pattern is across very different kinds of organisation, which is part of what makes Kerr’s research durable rather than a single anecdote. He documented the same divergence between stated hope and actual reward in settings as different as politics, medicine and academia, alongside manufacturing and insurance — which suggests the mechanism is not specific to production-floor culture or to manufacturing incentive design in particular, but is a general property of how reward systems shape behaviour regardless of the stated intention layered on top of them.
Where the real gap sits
The gap rarely sits at the level of communication at all — it sits in the distance between what leadership says matters and what the floor’s own performance system still measures. A quality-focused strategic message layered on top of an unchanged, volume-based shift scorecard does not create ambiguity about which one governs behaviour; it creates a clear, if unspoken, signal that the scorecard is the real priority and the message is aspirational. Supervisors, who are themselves measured against the same unchanged scorecard, have every rational reason to continue managing to it, regardless of how clearly they understood and even agreed with the new strategic message.
This is compounded by the fact that changing a floor-level measurement system is a slower, more technically involved undertaking than issuing a communication, which means the easier lever — more messaging — tends to get pulled first, and repeatedly, while the harder lever that would actually shift behaviour goes untouched. A quality push announced three times without a corresponding change to how shifts are scored is not evidence that the floor is resistant to change; it is evidence that the floor is responding consistently to the incentive that has, in practice, remained constant throughout.
A further, quieter version of this gap involves supervisors caught explicitly between the two signals. A supervisor who genuinely believes the new quality priority matters, but who is still evaluated and rewarded on the old volume-based scorecard, faces a direct personal cost for acting on the stated priority over the measured one. Asking supervisors to resolve this conflict through personal conviction alone, without changing what they are actually measured against, places an unreasonable burden on individuals to override a system that continues, structurally, to reward the opposite behaviour.
There is a related pattern worth naming for leadership teams reviewing why a previous strategic push also failed to change floor behaviour: if the scorecard was updated once, several strategic priorities ago, and has not been revisited since, the floor may currently be optimising diligently for a priority that is itself two or three iterations out of date — not actively resisting the newest message, but faithfully executing an older one that nobody formally retired. Tracing the current scorecard’s own history, rather than assuming it reflects whatever was most recently announced, often reveals exactly which past priority the floor is still, quietly, working toward.
Where this shows up
The pattern described here is most recognisable in manufacturers, part of the wider Asset and Production-Based grouping. The same organisational questions appear, under different names, in other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- What is the production floor’s current scorecard actually measuring, and does it match what leadership’s most recent strategic communication says matters most?
- If a supervisor optimised perfectly for their own current performance measure, would that behaviour align with or work against the stated strategic priority?
- How long has it been since the floor-level measurement system itself was reviewed against the organisation’s current priorities, rather than its priorities from when the system was built?
- Where a supervisor is caught between a stated priority and a measured one, what would it currently cost them personally to act on the stated priority instead?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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