notes-science-psych-autonomyMasteryPurpose

summary of a talk by Dan Pink https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=youtu.be :

I want to give you two that call into question this idea that if you reward something, you get more of the behavior you want and if you punish something you get less of it.

Let's go from London to the mean streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the northeast of the United States, and talk about a study at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They took a whole group of students and gave them a set of challenges. Things like... ..They gave them these challenges and, to incentivise performance, they gave them three levels of reward. If you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward. If you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward. If you were one of the top performers, you got a large cash prize. ... As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected. The higher the pay, the better the performance. That makes sense. ... Once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. ... They say, "This is freaky. Let's test it somewhere else. "Maybe that $50, $60 prize "isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student! "Let's go to a place where $50 is more significant, relatively. "We're going to go to Madurai, rural India, "where $50, $60 is actually a significant sum of money." They replicated the experiment in India, roughly as follows. ... I mean, sorry, low performance - two weeks' salary. Medium performance - a month's salary. High performance - two months' salary. ... What happened was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward. This time around, the people offered the top reward did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worse performance. What's interesting is that it isn't that anomalous. This has been replicated over and over again by psychologists, by sociologists and by economists - over and over and over again. ... Fact - money is a motivator at work, but in a slightly strange way. If you don't pay people enough, they won't be motivated. There's another paradox here. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, so they're not thinking about money, they're thinking about the work. Once you do that, there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction - autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed, direct our own lives. In many ways, traditional notions of management run foul of that. Management is great if you want compliance. If you want engagement, which is what we want in the workforce today, as people are doing more sophisticated things, self-direction is better. Let me give you some examples of almost radical forms of self-direction in the workplace that lead to good results. Let's start with Atlassian, an Australian software company. They do something really cool. Once a quarter on a Thursday, they say to their developers, "For the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want, "the way you want, with whomever you want. "All we ask is that you show the results to the company "in this fun meeting - not a star chamber session, "but with beer and cake and fun and things like that." ... They're saying, "You probably want to do something interesting. "Let me get out of your way." ... Let's talk about mastery - our urge to get better at stuff. We like to get better at stuff. This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. ... It seems to fly in the face of so many things, but you have Linux powering one out of four corporate servers in Fortune 500 companies, Apache powering more than the majority of web servers, Wikipedia. What's going on? Why are people doing this? Many are technically sophisticated, highly skilled people who have jobs. OK? They have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay, doing sophisticated technological work. And yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work, not for their employer, but for someone else for free. That's a strange economic behavior. Economists have looked into it. "Why are you doing this?" It's overwhelmingly clear - challenge and mastery, along with making a contribution, that's it. What you see more and more is the rise of the "purpose motive". More and more organizations want some kind of transcendent purpose. Partly because it makes coming to work better, partly because that's the way to get better talent. ... "