A great part of a companies success is its employees. If a company only rewarded teams and not individuals, then all an employee has to do is seek to be in a very strong team. Essentially that employee wouldn’t have to do any work. That’s just one thought. It’s also important to reward individuals in order to create this sense of competition, even if its a minor one. Because competition across employees brings forth a successful company. There is a disconnect here though and this can bring unseen consequences. For example, if there’s too much competition within teams, work life is going to suck. Everyone would be out to get everyone else. A way my company tackles this issue is that they give each employee a rating at the end of the year based on their performance compared to other employees in their level. So an associate engineer can only be compared to other associate engineers. Also, there can’t be more than one or two associate engineers within the same team. This helps bring down competition on a team level and allows management at the end of the year to pick. Each manager has a variety of levels of engineers that they’re in charge of, so that when the end of the year comes, managers are the ones ‘fighting’ for their engineers to get a better ranking against other managers.