Beyond Rewards and Punishments
Common Assumptions Questioned
Two studies that call into question the ideas that:
- If you reward something, do you get more of the behavior you want?
- If you punish someone, you get less of the behavior you want.
Mechanical Tasks
As long as the task involved used only a mechanical skill the bonuses worked as expected. Higher pay = better performance. That makes sense.
For simple, straightforward tasks reward mechanisms work great.
Cognitive Tasks
Once the task called for rudimentary cognitive skill the larger the reward led to poorer performance.
When a task gets more complicated, it requires some conceptual, creative thinking, those types of motivators don’t work.
The Role of Money
Fact: Money is a motivator. If you don’t pay enough, people won’t be motivated.
Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. So pay people enough to take money off the table so they aren’t thinking about money, but rather the task/work at hand.
Three Factors for Better Performance
Autonomy
The desire to be self-directed
Mastery
The urge to get better at stuff
Purpose
More organizations want a transcendent purpose
Traditional notions of management run foul of this. Management is great if you want compliance but if you want engagement, self-directed is better.
The Power of Purpose
When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.
“Our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place.”
— Skype
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
— Steve Jobs
We are purpose maximizers, not profit maximizers. We care about mastery very deeply and we want to be self-directed.