Custom «The Soccer Team» Essay Paper Sample

In a soccer team, there are many players with different roles. A soccer team consists of a striker, a midfielder, a defender and a goal keeper. The striker's mission is to ensure that the ball gets behind the net in order to make a score and win a match. The midfielder's mission is to control the game and pass the ball to the striker so that he can score a goal. The defender’s and goal keeper's missions are similar. They both need to prevent the opposite team from making a goal. Soccer is a thoroughly teamwork-based sport, and everyone’s role in the team is significantly beneficial. They share either victory or lose in vain together. A soccer team coach always tells the players to work as a team and share the victory, and he or she will treat everyone fairly. Unfortunately, people have found out that this is not a true story. Many soccer teams always have one or two famous players whose salary is much higher (mostly four or five times more) than that for other players. In this case, while the coach is hoping for a better teamwork with each player (A behavior), he/she is only rewarding the best and famous player in the team (B behavior). In addition, some coaches hope to have a player with top fit quality during the game (A Behavior), but they send the player to the field while fully aware that he is injured. This leaves the player with serious injuries after the match has ended (B behavior).

Coaches need to reward soccer players as a team but not individually rewarding someone who is a star in the team. This will make the other players feel that the coach is unfair to reward the star player alone. Furthermore, the coach has to set a specific reward system for rewarding team players. This is essential in order to show fairness and make all the players feel that they are being treated fairly in the team. The coach should set up a positive reinforcement for people who perform exemplarily in a match. When all the players do fantastically in a match, the coach needs to reward them by giving them bonus money as an encouragement and praising them to maintain the same performance during the next match. When some of the players perform poorly, the coach has to act in order to eliminate those undesired behaviors because they will make the team incorporate during the match. The coach may come up with some form of punishments for players with such a performance in a match in order to warn the team that there is no room for poor performance during a match. The punishment could be a player who performs poorly in a match not receiving the bonus money in the next match, even if he performs well on that match. By having positive and negative punishments, the team will become more focused on team play, instead of individual effort. The coach should always promote the importance of a team playing together instead of a Rambo to keep scoring goals without the teamwork.

Although rewarding players and encouraging them to perform well on a match is valuable, some coaches want their soccer players to enjoy the way they play the soccer instead of playing hard just for the rewards. These coaches need to make their soccer players play their game with intrinsic, instead of extinctive motivation. Even though the former motivation is exceedingly hard to build up with, it is more effective than the extrinsic one. Soccer players, perform well in every match because they love to play as a team with intrinsic motivation, instead of chasing after the money. These soccer players will try as hard as they can to perform on the field and to win the match as their own reward. In addition, the coach should not send players out of the field when they are injured because it will make them less loyal to the team. This is also likely to damage the team’s reputation. Moreover, the coach can set up a goal-setting theory for the team to lead it to have a better performance. Setting a specific and challenging goal for the team, for example, the team must have the champion’s cup this year, will encourage it to try and achieve the best results.

In conclusion, I have learnt that most of the companies’ rewarding systems are totally wrong and useless. In Steven Kerr's article, he mentions that people who work in an insurance company are awarded depending on their performance. Employees with an outstanding performance level are awarded 5% of the company's profit share. The employees with a satisfactory performance are awarded 4% while the employees with an ok performance are awarded 3%. There is a rule for having this profit share; people who have been absent and late for three or more times in a period of six months will not get any of the company’s profit. This led the employees to be going to the company every day but, in essence, not working there, which is wasting the company's resources. This is a pathetic example of rewarding employees. A wrong awarding system cannot motivate employees to work hard for a company. In addition, it can also damage the company's resources and increase undesired behavior among the employees.