Author Description

Certain orthodoxies in Leadership literature die very hard despite empirical evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps more true about reward and punishment than about any other concept in Organizational Behavior. When this research was conducted during 1982-86 at Texas Tech University under the supervision of Professor Jerry Hunt, a world-renowned scholar in leadership, it was prompted by a desire to test empirically the validity of popular beliefs concerning reward as the more effective tool of performance enhancement as compared to punishment. This research put the notion to test in a tightly controlled laboratory setting and found, to the researchers' utter surprise, that punishment is far more effective than reward in enhancing performance. The implications of this finding did not sit well with mainstream orthodoxy then, and they do not now. Yet, the results speak for themselves.