The Use of Merit Pay and Incentives The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Merit Pay and Incentives as motivators for increased productivity. The key focus is the system at Richmond Memorial Hospital. To do so, one must begin at the beginning….. The use of financial incentives (financial rewards) paid to workers whose production exceeds some predetermined standard was popularized by Frederick Taylor in the late 1800s. As a supervisory employee of the Midvale Steel Company, he had become concerned with what he called "systematic soldiering". This was the tendency of employees to work at the slowest pace possible and the fact that some of these same worke