Have you ever cut corners? Maybe you used 1.2 line spacing in your college essays to better meet the "five-page minimum." Perhaps you've parked in a no-parking zone. So, okay, you're "guilty and guilty." But you'd never go as far as Volkswagen -- true? You'd never cheat on emissions standards -- right?
The German car company must have been unique; it must have had a monopoly on unethical people.
Unfortunately, that's not quite true. Research and experience show that if employees are motivated by the wrong things, they are unlikely to perform their best. In the worst-case scenarios, even the best employees may cut corners in order to tick off boxes.
We should have learned this by now. A classic example: During the days of British colonial rule in India, the city of Delhi had a cobra infestation. To get rid of the snakes, the colonial government reportedly implemented a logical new policy: a bounty paid for every dead snake brought in.
Dead snakes piled up. But all was not as it seemed. A few clever entrepreneurs realized there was good money to be made from dead cobras, so they opened cobra farms. Once the government realized what had happened, it canceled the bounty. Once the value of cobras plummeted, the snakes were released from the farms. And, in the end, the city was plagued by more cobras than back before the initiative began.
Hence the name "cobra effect," when individuals perform based on misaligned incentives that ultimately jeopardize their organization's mission.
Read our full article in Entrepreneur to learn how to prevent your organization from becoming the next cobra farm headline.
