That study seems strange to me. The point of profit sharing was never the increased productivity of the company. It was better wealth equality both within the company and society at large. The goal is to stop shuffling all of the wealth and value of a company into the top few employees, with a 300x wage gap between the highest and lowest paid workers (and all of the social effects that come with that wealth gap). To frame the point of profit sharing around productivity is to make it a failure at a goal it wasn’t trying to reach.
I think people looking at profit sharing from the organization's perspective would disagree. John Stuart Mill wrote about this all the way back in the 1840s, saying “the increased zeal of the workpeople continued to be a full compensation to (capital owners), even in a pecuniary sense, for the share of profit which (capital owners) renounced in their favor.” Aligning incentives for workers and capital owners via profit sharing should, in theory, make workers more productive, and the fact that it didn’t in this case is worth exploring more.
That study seems strange to me. The point of profit sharing was never the increased productivity of the company. It was better wealth equality both within the company and society at large. The goal is to stop shuffling all of the wealth and value of a company into the top few employees, with a 300x wage gap between the highest and lowest paid workers (and all of the social effects that come with that wealth gap). To frame the point of profit sharing around productivity is to make it a failure at a goal it wasn’t trying to reach.
I think people looking at profit sharing from the organization's perspective would disagree. John Stuart Mill wrote about this all the way back in the 1840s, saying “the increased zeal of the workpeople continued to be a full compensation to (capital owners), even in a pecuniary sense, for the share of profit which (capital owners) renounced in their favor.” Aligning incentives for workers and capital owners via profit sharing should, in theory, make workers more productive, and the fact that it didn’t in this case is worth exploring more.