As part of the IM initiative most banks were eager to align corporate and individual
goals via a complex rewards system. Banks offered both tangible and intangible
rewards for reaching organisational goals. Berry (1999, p. 174) states that employees
who feel as part-owners of an organisation are more willing to work towards
sustaining the corporation’s success, as they have more to gain. However, the
creation and nourishment of this mentality carries certain costs and liabilities, for
example, the need to increase the use of monetary rewards in order to motivate
employees to feel part of the organisation. There seemed to be a strong emphasis
on the use of monetary rewards especially for front line employee (branch managers
included), with respect to the opening of new accounts and sales achieved against
set targets. Such monetary rewards took the form of bonuses and commissions. One
bank used individual bonuses for customer account managers, personal banking
service managers, and branch managers to complement the team bonus based on
the performance of the group in terms of sales and customer service. Another bank
launched personal bonus schemes for staff with sales responsibility such as: general
sales supervisors, branch managers, and savings and investments advisers. Thus, the
front-line staff had more opportunities to obtain monetary rewards than the backoffice
staff. The key reason for this is that banks tended to link monetary rewards to
quantitative targets such as sales figures. Since, only customer-contact personnel have
sales targets, only they have an opportunity to obtain these rewards.