Our team had been working hard for several months develop a short course for the nonscientist employees of our pharmaceutical company to help them understand how the Research and Development division went about discovering and developing new drugs. We had just finished the presentation of the prototype course to a group of 20 employees, ranging from secretaries to directors and vice presidents. The day-long course had gone well, and most of the written evaluations from the participants were glowing. Now, with just a little fine-tuning, the course would finally be ready to be presented to the whole company. As a reward, the vice president of R&D proposed a celebratory dinner complete with fine wine and gourmet food. Some of our team were delighted. Others, myself included, just wanted to go home for some quiet time and to crash, but that, of course, was not possible. So, off we went to extend our workday late into the evening, as a "reward" for a job well done.

Providing the appropriate rewards to keep a team motivated may seem like one of the easiest tasks in team management, but in reality it may be one of the most difficult things to do well. Certainly, spending one evening out when I would have rather been at home did not, by itself, make me decide to flee corporate life. However, many such evenings and weekends over the long term - leaving me with the feeling that the company could command my time and energy on short notice at any time of the day or night, sometimes for what I viewed as frivolous reasons - was certainly a major reason I eventually looked for new venues where I would have more control over my work and personal life.

Today, as a freelance writer and professor, I have that control, and I'm far more satisfied, even though I work just as many, maybe more, nights and weekends as I did as a corporate scientist, and I do it for less money. The difference is that I am in control of my schedule. I have the sense that I'm doing creative work and that I am doing it for myself. "People create because it is satisfying to them - it is self-actualizing. This is why many standard management techniques fail in the area of encouraging creativity. Creative people are marching to their own drummer and seeking their own deep-rooted rewards. They may not be seeking the rewards normally held out by managers in order to motivate people," says Robert J. Graham, in his book Project Management as if People Mattered.

Graham's statement about the self-actualization of creative work is certainly true for me. When the vice president took our team out to dinner - to an arena in which he would be the dominant person at the table, holding court, if you will - it conjured up the perverse notion that he was taking the credit for our success, and it undermined that sense of self-actualization. What was meant to be a reward for a job well done ended up being be a major disincentive to me and probably to others on the team.

So, how does one effectively manage a successful team to keep its members working over the long term? One point to remember is that successful teams must achieve community (see The Dynamics of Team Formation) in order to do their best work. However, teams rarely remain in community over a long period of time. Team formation is a dynamic process; a group may move all the way back to chaos or pseudocommunity and then have to work its way back into community for the next project. In many cases, the team may only attain community when it is necessary to accomplish a particular goal, or even just before the deadline for the goal (see Teamwork: What to Do When the Deadline Looms). Thus, one important principle in maintaining an ongoing team is that there must be sufficient work over the long term to keep the team dynamic in action. Otherwise, it may be best to disband the team and reform it when a new job comes up. This is often better than letting the team wallow in pseudocommunity or chaos, from which it can become increasingly difficult to move back into community.

Rewards for successfully completing a team project must include kudos that will be recognized such by all team members. The key is to understand the personality types or temperaments of the individual members (see Making Teamwork Work: The Importance of Diverse Psychological Types) and to then provide a variety of rewards so that all of the members feel recognized for their work. According to Susan Nash, author of Turning Team Performance Inside Out: Team Types and Temperament for High-Impact Results, team members who are "artisans will be excited to celebrate successes; guardians will feel proud with recognizing achievements, rationalists will be stimulated by new intellectual learning, and idealists will feel enriched by team-building events and opportunities to reconnect." She suggests that each approach be used at different times to celebrate the team's achievements in order to keep the team working optimally.

In a scenario such as the one I described earlier, team members with the artisan temperament would feel most satisfied by the R&D vice president's night at a fancy restaurant. These are the people who are most comfortable in celebrating successes in style and who are motivated by things like social events, awards, or contests.

Team members with the guardian temperament would probably be energized more by recognition of their small day-to-day achievements. This group has a strong memory of the team's previous successes and failures, and can be counted on to compare new achievements with old. Left to themselves, they may forget, or more likely consciously forgo, a celebration of the team's major success because of their natural tendency to caution and because they will only recognize what they consider the very best accomplishments. They may be made very uncomfortable by the fancy celebration, because they fear that the accomplishment is not sufficiently worthwhile to merit such a lavish reward.

For the rationalists, such as myself, "it is important to continue to learn and develop new mental models," says Nash. We live in an inner, rational world. Thus, I, the rationalist, analyzed and interpreted the vice president's reward as a means of taking credit for the accomplishment himself. A better reward for the rationalist would be some type of recognition that provided an opportunity to learn a new skill or an opportunity for further achievement, something that the individual could pursue and then relate back to the team. At the end of the successful day, the rationalist desires a period of quiet introspection, a chance to relive the success and revel in the accomplishment.

The members of the team with the idealist temperament would probably prefer to celebrate by interacting and discussing the day's work with the other members of the team, individually or as a group. They might enjoy a celebratory dinner with just the team members, where they could rehash the day's events as part of a group or in one-on-one conversations without the imposition of the vice president's presence.

The important thing to remember in keeping a group motivated is that what motivates one person will not necessarily will motivate another. Since well-functioning teams must contain members with diverse personality types and temperaments, team rewards, too, will require a number of different approaches at different times.

Finally, as a conclusion to the last article of this four-article series on teamwork, it seems fitting to quote Susan Nash on the importance of respect: "If the team members don't have respect [and I would add trust] for each other and for the leader, and if the team leader doesn't have it for each and every team member, the team will not succeed."