An interesting video. Well worth the watch. Hint – it’s not necessarily the carrot OR the stick.

In a nutshell – both the carrot and the stick produce the opposite of what they intend – the more you incent people, the poorer their performance becomes. Once a task has any cognitive element to it (even at the smallest level of cognitive thought) incentive leads to poor performance.

Once people’s basic financial needs are met, motivation is driven most by a desire to connect to something larger than themselves vs. getting more monetary rewards… Over incentives actually lead to poorer performance in aggregate and often to unethical behaviors…..

COMMENTS

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4 responses to “The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us….”

1. Test Blog says:

   06/14/2010 at 12:14 pm

   This technique may work for people who work at google, but for all of the slaves, and for anyone with mundane repetitive work, this is all rather silly.

   Reply
2. Mr. T says:

   06/14/2010 at 12:37 pm

   There was interesting This American Life episode (#403 from March 23rd) you can find online all about NUMMI – the JV between Toyota and GM that launched in 1983. Lots of parallels with what was presented in the YouTube video. The GM model was woefully inefficient – cars were more expensive to produce, resulted in lower quality, etc…vs. the Toyota model which actively solicited input from the line works (the epitome of mundane repetitive work) resulted in lower costs to produce, better quality, etc… The GM plant that applied the Toyota methodology (the NUMMI plant) was the WORST plant in their system and was slated for a shutdown. Within a year of applying the new methods – e.g. more teamwork, actively soliciting advice from workers, allowing them to be part of the process, etc…they became the most efficient and less defect driven plant in the system. Interesting case study that really speaks to exactly the ideas in the YouTube video…

   Here's a link to the This American Life Episode should you want to check it out:

   http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi?bypass=true

   Reply
3. Todd says:

   06/14/2010 at 4:53 pm

   Thanks for this. In many sense, this is a compelling argument for re-orienting how we interpret the Bible away from economically influenced paradigms. God threatens with a stick, but Christ absorbs the stick and gives freely of his bank of carrots. Rick warren, purpose has become a faded buzzword, but there are other beneficial avenues.

   Reply
4. Joshua Corrigan says:

   06/14/2010 at 6:33 pm

   Really cool. Sent this to my managers. I may be commenting on blogs for a living tomorrow.

   Thanks

   Reply