Motivation – you’re doing it wrong | The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Here’s (yet another) great TED presentation – this one is by Dan Pink and is about the mismatch between what science knows and what businesses do to motivate people.

Dan’s point is that rewarding performance mostly doesn’t work and often leads to worse performance.

For tasks that are simple and straight-forward and require no creativity or cognitive skills, extrinsic motivation works fine and promising people rewards for good performance increases performance.

But as soon as a task requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, performance decreases if you offer performance rewards. And the larger the reward, the worse the performance.

13 thoughts on “Motivation – you’re doing it wrong”

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Oh I love this presentation, so glad you included it Alex. We (Atlassian), were so chuffed to be included in Dan’s talk. He really is a very good speaker. If anyone has questions about Atlassian and how we do FedEx Day or any of our other initiatives then please let me know, I’d be happy to answer any questions.

Excellent presentation and moved me to blog extensively about it myself (http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/09/science-proves-carrots-are-rotten-and.html). Dan speaks so elegantly to why we cannot incent someone to do the work — but we can help them find the meaning and purpose in the work such that they very much want to engage fully in it themselves.

Well done!

Good point to know about incentives. Inner ones are pretty much important.

Alex, thanks for sharing. I think the speaker did make the point, how to motivate in different cituation. I love all your big or small sharing articles because these are real inspirite for the people who facing difficulties especially during the current recession. Keep it going, I’ll always stand beside you.

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