Too much of Recognition

Over the last few months, I have been asked one question by a few clients/prospective clients - "If we do so much Recognition, won't it backfire on us? Won't we set people's expectations too high in terms of appraisal ratings, bonuses etc.? "

In all the cases, my response or my team member's response was the classic one "Has anyone ever told you to stop giving them Recognition?" - we then talk about various definitive studies around this including Gallup's Q12 survey, where one of the questions is "Have you been recognized in the last 7 days?". Using this ammunition of strong responses, we handle the question deftly.

But in the last several weeks, I have asked myself this question, and intuitively feel that this needs to be researched more and thought through more - even though I cannot really argue about the merit of the responses we usually give.

In order to try and do this in a meaningful yet fun way, I met with a few people managers in our client organizations, who don't seem to believe too much in the Recognition stuff (Raw criteria I used was those managers who don't get excited to meet with me to talk about Recognition).

Here is the data I collected from 5 of them - stated verbatim with minor edits:

1) Boss, if I keep giving out Spot awards to my people, I am setting expectations that they will get good ratings - I am the one who will suffer at the end of the year when HR tells me that 30% of my people will have to get a below average rating.
2) We are paying these guys a salary for showing and doing work. Recognition has to be done only when the guy goes above and beyond what is expected of him. Saying Thank You for what is in his job description makes no sense to me.
3) If I keep recognizing my people, they will stop valuing any awards I give them. Unless you create scarcity of awards, the value of the awards will go down and render them useless.
4) Look - we are a fast growing company. I would rather focus on promoting the good guys than do all this Award stuff. Maybe in 10 years, when our growth slows down, I will be forced to do all this stuff.
5) Don't get me wrong - I like Recognition and believe that it will have a big impact on our people. But our management needs to believe in it and provide budgets to do good stuff - right now we are doling out peanuts. If you throw peanuts, monkeys will dance - you won;t get performance. Come to talk to me after you have convinced our management to spend on Recognition.

I am not even going to attempt to analyze the data, but will probably try and undertake a small project to study this perception around "Too much of Recognition" not being healthy.