I strongly believe that "No fear of non-performance" in any organisation is directly proportional to no motivation or low motivation for performers. When the times for IT were great and all were busy with projects buzzing I felt less time was being spent on identifying the performance and non-performance. This resulted in some decisions which though were not wise but still worked as the business was great and even one or two slips could be overlooked which is not the case now.
I tried to analyze the reasons for No fear of Non-Performance and the one which looked directly onto my face was No definition of performance. Who to blame for this - organisation, managers or the employee. For sure it cannot be the employee and organisation is nothing more than the people so it means that the managers themselves are responsible for no fear of non-performance of their subordinates. Again as I always say it flows from the top. But are the managers not willing to do this i.e. set good performance criteria; sure they would love to it, so where is the issue. For this analysis we will need to move a step up - have the good performance criteria been defined for the manager himself, if not then I am not sure how he can set the goals for his team and he may still set them but cannot be sure that his and his teams goals are aligned.
Above could be one reason the other I can think of is lack of willingness or competence to challenge non-performance. It is very essential to challenge not only the team but ourselves too. Customer for sure will ask for performance hence if the manager does not challenge non-performers then the customer will have to do it each time, which I do not think is a great idea.
Coming back to the point of No fear of non performance being directly proportional to low or no motivation for performance, this is so true. End of the day all want reward and appreciation for good work but when the good and bad are equally appreciated then that is actually a disaster and a negative motivation for the performers.
Please do not try to read non-performance as making mistakes, making mistakes is fine and a step in learning process. Non-performance is failing to meet the desired expectation level. Even non-performance is not the problem as long as the people have the right attitude to be able to realize the need to move into the performance zone. The danger is "No Fear of Non Performance" or "Unwillingness to move to performance Zone" and the lack of clarity to define difference between "Performance and Non Performance".
