Human characteristics are full of surprises. One of the interesting facets, is the way we are motivated to do certain work. If you really want to know more about motivation, consider the following two contradictory questions at first: 

1) When you reward someone, do you get more activity out of that person than you expected? 

2) When you punish someone, do you get less from that person? 

In order to get to the core, The M.I.T conducted a study on a large group of students and presented a number of challenges in front of them that would challenge their physical and mental ability.  

The mental tests included number games, memory games, solving word puzzles, Sudoku etc. 

The physical ability tests included throwing a ball in the basket etc. 

To get a better performance, they gave the participants three levels of reward. The rewards was like follows: If they can get through the task anyhow, they will be given a small monetary reward. If they managed to get a minimum level, they will be given better prize money. If they perform excellently, they will be given a covetous monetary reward.  

Now, what was the result?  

1) As long as the task remained mechanical, they were motivated by the strategy towards the higher the pay were, the chance of performing well increases. They was also intrigued by the bonus reward.  

2) But, as soon as they were given a mental ability test to check their cognitive skills, they performed resultantly poor inspite of a huge reward. 

Now, isn’t this surprising? 

Many economists and scholars from other disciplines will adjudge the second point in this way- as we surpass our cognitive ability, much to our surprise, rewards like these don’t sound fetching anymore. This is just opposite to the law stated by Behavioural Physics.  

Once when the reward was reformed, means the lowest performer will get money equivalent to two week’s salary, the medium performer will get the money equivalent to one month salary, and the best performer will get the salary equivalent to two months. Not surprisingly, the highest reward got the worst performance. Higher incentives still led to worst performance. 

The fact is that it is not surprising. A number of psychologists, sociologists and other scholars believe that if the task is simple, like if you do A, you get B, people undoubtedly performed well. If they have to follow a set of rules, the typical carrot and stick approach, the better. But when it comes to a work which requires thinking, analysing, conceptualising etc, even the highest monetary rewards fall flat.  

Money is one of the biggest motivators. People won’t work if they are not satisfied with the pay package. The rule is that pay the people enough so that they think about the work only. Based on this fact, there are 3 factors which can lead to better performance and self-gratification. 

1) Autonomy- where the people fix the direction of work by themselves. If you want to keep your employee engaged to the management task, give them the autonomy to work. Don’t manipulate each and every step.  

2) Mastery- The urge to develop the skills to do better work. For example, there are a number of technically sophisticated people across the globe. People who have a good job, that are creating something and giving it for free, like the Wikipedia, Linux and many many more open source solutions etc. The question is how, and why? The answer is if you master a skill, you can contribute hugely not for yourself but for the other people’s benefit as well. 

3) Purpose- Organizations work on a particular purpose, so that they can get better output. But the fact is, when purpose gets alienated from profit, it will lead to poor performance. When you have a purpose driven by profit, you get the urge to do something better and different. 

So, when an organization can combine autonomy, mastery and purpose and treat workers as a human being, then there will be no need of extra motivation. 

Tim Hoiseth

Tim has background as is business psychologist and work sociologist with expertise in building organisations and teams to solve problems for the future. Tim has expertise in technology and the symbiosis between human interaction and technology in operational processes.