Case Study Hr Practices Of American Express

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life”(Levitt and Dubner 12). Levitt and Dubner once mentioned in their book “Freakonomics”. According to Oxford dictionary, incentives are something tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity (“incentives”). In business field, incentives are something given by bosses to encourage their employees to endeavour in bringing benefits to their business. For a simple example, the employee who hits the monthly or year sales target will get cash or prizes as incentives. Apparently, these incentives are something that motivates employees maintains their great performance and also to motivate other employee, whoever wants to get the incentives, work harder.

Performance management system makes a clear link between the performance and compensation, and allows the employees to understand the areas which need to be improved and directs them to appropriate training opportunities to enable improvement in performance to take place. Joseph Martocchio says, “Work with line managers to design the performance appraisal plan which best fits the specific duties and responsibilities of particular roles” (Martocchio, 2011). Compensation and reward decisions are likely to be arbitrary in the absence of a good performance management system. In short, performance management is a key component of talent management in organizations. It allows assessing the current talent and making predictions

Good performance is rewarded through timely job promotions, special recognition and in some cases monetary rewards and incentives.

Although the "pay" in "pay for performance" can refer to any of the more traditional components of reward programs, the organization should look beyond its current forms of compensation and consider whether additional approaches might work best in the long term.

A well-articulated compensation philosophy drives organizational success by aligning pay and other rewards with business strategy. It provides the foundation for plan design and administration and anchors current and future plans to the company's culture and values (Kaplan, 2006, p.32). Recognizing and rewarding achievement is the cornerstone of the company A’s compensation philosophy. The mission of the company is to attract, select, place and promote all individuals based on their qualifications. The company believes that performance-based compensation helps attract, develop and retain talented professionals. In addition to base pay which based upon local market conditions and targeted to be above market, the company provides the following types of potential compensation to reward performance:

Pay for performance systems have further been proven to have two advantages for organizations: attracting more high-quality employees and motivating employees to exert more effort at their jobs. (Gordon, Kaswin) This paper will show the positive benefits of performance pay as

Reward Management (RM) has been defined as the distribution of monetary and non-monetary rewards to employees in an effort to align the interests of the employees, the organisation, and its shareholders (O’Neil, 1998). In addition O’Neil (1998) also suggests that a RM system can serve the purpose of attracting prospective job applicants, retaining valuable employees, motivating employees, ensuring legal requirements relating to direct and indirect rewards are not violated, assisting the company in achieving human resource and business objectives, and ultimately assisting the organisation in obtaining a competitive advantage.

Currently there is no formal incentive system. Many of the rewards are based on Berardi’s perception of employee performance. If he does not have the opportunity to have direct communication with all employees, it is a possibility that he is not able to appropriately assess individual performances. The employees themselves felt that “above-standard performance was not always noted.” This sometimes resulted in sub-optimal achievements being recognized while the employee going the extra mile was getting passed over.

Recognizing and rewarding high-performance is a key recommendation for any approach when managing any merit pay program (HRIS 2012). Merit pay is a compensation system where base pay increases and is determined by an individual’s performance. Using a merit pay plan is a good way for an organization to reward high performance is one benefit when using merit pay programs. The first step in implementing or improving a merit pay program is to have a solid performance management program, and this is another way a merit pay program is beneficial. Merit pay is a way to be successful and effectively implement merit pay with a uplift in salaries, and this is a third way using a merit pay program is beneficial to an organization. There are some drawbacks when using merit pay programs, such as paying some employees more than others. If you pay high-performing workers more than low- performing employees, the high- performers may stay, causing the low- performers to complain or leave the organization. A second drawback in using merit pay program is that employees become less motivated if not paid to their satisfaction. For example, if employees feel they should be making more money for their performance, this causes them to have low self esteem, and want to find employment at other organization. The last drawback associated with

American Express began as a freight forwarding company in the 1850s, then repositioned as a travel agency, a financial and consulting services company. By recognizing that technology has changed the way people communicate and transact with one another, American Express understands the scope and role of internet technology on the travel market. The corporation turned itself into the booming sector of online services and became an interactive business player in a wide array of services. Today, American Express, known as Amex, is a multi-billion dollar corporation that has reshaped its services and operates more than 1700 travel service locations in over 130 countries across the globe.

American Express, also know as AMEX, is a global financial services company headquartered in New York City and founded in 1850. With 54,000 employees and a revenue of over 35 billion dollars American Express stands tall on the New York Stock Exchange (Sec.gov). American Express is best known for it’s credit cards, which make up about twenty-five percent of total dollar volume in credit card transactions in The United States of America (Reviews.greatplacetowork.com). American Express’ goal is to maintain a leading and almost elite reputation with as many qualified card holders as possible. American Express does this by concentrating on the customer’s experience and branding that experience. American Express’ key components in maintaining and further exceling into this goal includes focusing on their human recourses, social responsibility, and marketing techniques.

To motivate employees to work towards reaching organizational goals, managers frequently depend on some form of enticement. Beyond monetary compensation, awards and additional types of acknowledgment can be given, and the ability to choose a work schedule is a possibility. A reasonable pay system, which would be an incentive for individuals and groups to achieve organizational goals, is a hardship manager’s face (Jones & George, 2011). Within the company that I work for, every quarter awards are presented to Customer Service Agents who have maintained a 95 percent or above quality score. Monetary awards are given out as well as time off coupons.

Keeping employees motivated in addition to creating incentives and/or additional ways for employees to receive more compensation will create better performance overall within an organization. Contrary if company B gives their employees incentives to perform, without any motivational tactics they probably will not have as many top performances as company A, in addition the company may only seek short term rewards verses have long term success. Lack of motivation for employees within an organization, can cause long term damage for the company’s success. Different things motivate everyone; therefore there should be a system in place to keep employees motivated for the long term success of the company. In the MBM textbook under the concept of incentives, compensation, and motivation, there are a couple of different views of how it should be applied within an organization. We will discuss The Social Role of Profit, Personal Profit and Losses, and the way Market-Based Management view how incentives, compensation, and motivation should be applied and the things that effectively drive employees’ actions while at work.

Pay for performance is to link employees’ salary or salary increase to his or her performance. It seems to be a reasonable or attractive idea but it often does not work well in organizations. Please use at least 4 motivation theories or models to explain why pay for performance may not work as expected—particularly in government and nonprofit organizations.

The American Express is currently headquartered in the building called three world financial centres, in New York, United Stated of