Don't Blame the Wheel for Missing a Turn

@misc{bugayenko2026blog0601,
  author = {Bugayenko, Yegor},
  title = {{Don't Blame the Wheel for Missing a Turn}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.yegor256.com/260601.html}},
  year = {2026},
  month = {jun},
  note = {[Online; accessed 08-06-2026]}
}

Management gurus keep saying everyone must own the business result. BCG wants every company to build an “ownership mindset” at all levels. Each employee must feel responsible for the firm’s outcomes. Patrick Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, calls “inattention to results” the worst sin a team can commit. He wants us to give up our own goals for the shared number. They want the bottom line to belong to all of us. I disagree.

Nothing burns like being judged for what you didn’t do. Aristotle held that “on voluntary passions and actions praise and blame are bestowed, on those that are involuntary pardon, and sometimes also pity.” Later thinkers, from Kant to Thomas Nagel, turned the same instinct into the control principle: “we are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control.” Adam Smith agreed that reward belongs only to “actions of a beneficent tendency, which proceed from proper motives.” Tie a person’s praise or blame to results their own work never caused, and the judgment stops being fair.

Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory boils motivation down to a product:

Motivation = Expectancy × Instrumentality × Valence

Expectancy is your belief that effort will lead to performance. With no control over the outcome, it drops to zero. Instrumentality is the link from that performance to the reward. With no way to measure it, it drops to zero too. Valence is how much you want that reward. Even when it runs high, the three terms multiply, so one zero kills the whole product.

John Stacey Adams’s equity theory adds the next link: fairness. Workers “seek to maintain equity between the inputs that they bring to a job and the outcomes that they receive.” Those who feel short-changed “experience distress” and withdraw.

Yet most of us barely move the top line. Our effect on it is indirect, and impossible to measure.

W. Edwards Deming showed the first half with his red-bead experiment. Workers drew from a box rigged with a fixed ratio of red beads, were praised and punished for the count, and could do nothing to change it. “The performance of anybody, almost anybody,” he concluded, “is governed almost totally by the system he works in.”

The second half—you cannot measure one person’s share—is a basic result in the economics of the firm. In their classic paper on team production, Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz put it plainly: “marginal products of cooperative team members are not so directly and separably (i.e., cheaply) observable,” and “what a team offers to the market can be taken as the marginal product of the team but not of the team members.” Their fix was to measure each person’s input, not the team’s output.

So a company-size target, pinned on one person, does not pull. It pushes the other way.

Even the goal-setting psychologists who love stretch targets admit the limit: Höchli and colleagues note that a superordinate goal “can be too abstract and disconnected from actual behavior” to guide anyone’s next move.

What happens next is no mystery; researchers have studied it for years. Let people sense the judgment is rigged, and they react in ways industrial psychologists call counterproductive work behavior. At best, they quietly sabotage. At worst, they rebel.

Skarlicki and Folger tracked 240 employees and found that a sense of injustice reliably predicts “organizational retaliation behavior”: the disgruntled striking back at the firm they believe wronged them. Jerald Greenberg showed how literal the damage can be. When a company cut pay by 15% without a proper explanation, the workers who felt underpaid stole much more—the “hidden cost of pay cuts.”

The suggested fix: hold each person to their own work, and nothing more. Don’t cascade the OKRs, don’t open the books, don’t parade the top-line number before everyone, as if visibility alone were motivation. Don’t push people toward the metrics above them. Instead, hide those metrics from them altogether.

Keep the higher numbers out of sight. Nothing is left to feel manipulated by. Only one thing stays in view: the worker’s own metric. They can control it and measure it. On that ground, motivation does not just survive. It grows.

Yes, this defies the transparency gospel. That defiance is exactly the point.