Dan Pink is the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. If you want to know the answer to this, however, a quicker route than reading the book is to watch this highly-engaging YouTube animation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) from the UK’s Royal Society or Arts (and tagged by Leigh Carrick Moore – thank you!).
In the animation Dan Pink explains that higher incentives do not always lead to better performance. In experiments conducted by the MIT and funded by the Federal Reserve Bank it was discovered that, while non-cognitive (i.e. manual) tasks can be incentivised in a traditional way – meaning that more money equals better performance – cognitive tasks that require thought and creativity can’t, at least at the top. For cognitive tasks, it seems, once people are being paid “enough” paying them more does not lead to more in terms of output or performance.
What explains this? In the animation (and I assume in the book) Pink projects that we are dealing with a concept similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which material gain is not the key driver to human motivation, it is simply a means to an ends. Once people are comfortable, concepts such as creativity and morality become more important than mere zeroes added to the bottom line. Pink explained this by stating that our motivations are driven by autonomy (we want to direct our own lives), mastery (we have an urge to get better at stuff) and purpose (we want to make a contribution).
And, in case people concluded that this was fine for rich countries like America that can be seen as having more than enough and so would graduate into the sunlit uplands of morality and “purpose”, they also conducted the same experiments in India, with even more startling results. While low and middling incentives did, indeed, improve performance large incentives had the opposite impact, causing a major reversal in performance.
This is, of course, fantastically revelatory. But is it true? I have not read the book but throughout the animation I was expecting a different conclusion, or at least another factor to be taken into account: fear. I was expecting Pink to at least mention fear of failure, which must surely be an alternative reason why incentives failed to improve performance once the stakes are raised above a certain point and, as with the case in India (where higher incentives will have an even higher impact) actually had a detrimental effect on performance.
In fact the experiments were not dissimilar to those carried out by John W. Atkinson of Stanford University, David McClelland and others in the 1960s. Also focused on motivation, they set children reward-incentivised tasks and noticed that they approached them in one of two ways – either motivated to achieve the task (i.e. to succeed) or motivated to avoid failing the task (mostly through avoidance of undertaking the task). Atkinson concluded that those motivated to avoid the tasks had a high fear of failure. They were concerned by the prospect of public failure and, where they could, avoided even intermediately difficult tasks because of it.
Is there resonance with MIT’s experiments on incentives, as explained by Pink and animated by the RSA? Yes, I believe there is. The rewards on offer at the low end are enough to focus the mind on the task and its achievement. Yet at the high end the rewards change behaviour. In India particularly, these may be life changing rewards, making the outcome of the task a much larger focus than the task itself. Just ask any sportsman suffering from “choke” or Poker player suffering from “tilt” – both behavioural changes based on fear – and it is easy to see how high-end rewards can detrimentally-impact performance. The stakes have been raised to the point where we can no longer ignore them in order to focus on the task ahead, making our efforts edgy and fearful.
I am not stating that the MIT experiments came to the wrong conclusion and Dan Pink’s book may well take fear of failure into account (as may the MIT). My only opinion on this is that, once you are in tune with the concept of fear of failure (which my Reticular Activating System clearly is thanks to my forthcoming book What’s Stopping You?), you can’t help looking at the experiments in a different light and potentially coming to a different conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment