The puzzle of motivation

• Contingent, extrinsic motivators (if you do this, you get that)
  • work for tasks requiring narrow focus and blind execution
  • are antagonistic for tasks requiring creativity or conceptual thinking
• Ariely, Gneezy, et al
  • As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.
  • But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
  • Higher incentives, in fact, led to worse performance
• Economists at London School of Economics looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans inside of companies
  • Found a negative impact in overall performance.
• Intrinsic motivation
  • Autonomy: urge to direct our own lives
  • Master: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
  • Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
• Autonomy
  • Management is not seen in nature
  • Our traditional concept of management is good if you want compliance
  • Atlassian
    • daylong hackathons (Fedex days: you have to deliver something overnight)
    • 20% time (as taken from Google)
  • ROWE (Results Only Work Environment)
  • Encarta (extrinsic motivation) vs wikipedia (intrinsic motivation)