After making the point that IT teams need a variety of skills and need to work together and need to be aligned to the business first and technology second, Sean Chandler has this to say:
Nonetheless, an HR focus on individual achievement makes it incredibly difficult to change behavior in IT. As an IT leader, you can talk and talk about team performance—you can fund pizza parties, you can institute team-based recognition awards, and you even develop team-based metrics—but if individual compensation is based on individual performance, you end up pushing a large boulder up a steep hill.
Obviously the focus here is on IT but the principle is generally applicable. If you have a group of people who have to work together, and then set up a compensation and bonus structure that looks solely at individual performance, you are undermining your team before you have even started.
Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill 