Context:
A group of developers meeting tight schedules in a high-payoff market.
Forces:
Schedule motivations tend to be self-fulfilling: a wide range of schedules may be perceived as equally applicable for a given task.
Schedules are poor motivators.
Altruism and egoless teams are quaint, Victorian notions.
Companies often embark on make-or-break projects, and such projects should be managed differently from others.
Disparate rewards motivate those who receive them, but may frustrate their peers.
Solution:
"Very special" individuals might receive exceptional awards that are tied les strongly to team performance.
A celebration is a particularly effective reward [Zuckerman and Hatala].
Resulting Context:
An organization that focuses less on schedule (but see Size the Schedule) and more on customer satisfaction and systemic success. Such high rewards may cause individuals to over-extend themselves, leading to personal stress with potential risk to the project.
Design Rationale:
Empirical. There is a strong correlation between wildly successful software projects, and a very lucrative reward structure. Cases include QPW, cases cited at the Risk Derivatives Conference in New York on 6 May 1994; see Pay and Organization Development, by Edward E. Lawler, Addison-Wesley, ©1981. The place of reward mechanisms is well-established in the literature [Kilmann].
High rewards to some individuals may still de-motivate their peers, but rewarding on a team basis helps remove the "personal" aspect of this problem, and helps establish the mechanism as a motivator, in addition to being just a post-mortem soother.
DeBruler noted at the PLoP review of this pattern, that most contemporary organization culture derives from the industrial complex of the 1800s, which was patterned after the only working model available at the time: military management. He notes that most American reward mechanisms are geared more toward weeding out problems than toward encouraging solutions. A good working model is that of groups of doctors and lawyers, where managers are paid less than the employees.