CARROTS AND STICKS: The Seven Deadly Flaws
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
CHAPTER 2A
. . . and the Special Circumstances When They Do
Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad. If they were, Motivation 2.0 would never have flourished so long or accomplished so much. While an operating system centered around rewards and punishments has outlived its usefulness and badly needs an upgrade, that doesn’t mean we should scrap its every piece. Indeed, doing so would run counter to the science. The scholars exploring human motivation have revealed not only the many glitches in the traditional approach, but also the narrow band of circumstances in which carrots and sticks do their jobs reasonably well.
The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards—wages, salaries, benefits, and so on—are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
But once that’s established, there are circumstances where it’s okay to fall back on extrinsic motivators. To understand what those circumstances are, let’s return to the candle problem. In his study, Sam Glucksberg found that the participants who were offered a cash prize took longer to solve the problem than those working in a reward-free environment. The reason, you’ll recall, is that the prospect of a prize narrowed participants’ focus and limited their ability to see an inventive, nonobvious solution.
In the same experiment, Glucksberg presented a separate set of participants with a slightly different version of the problem. Once again, he told half of them he was timing their performance to collect data—and the other half that those who posted the fastest times could win cash. But he altered things just a bit. Instead of giving participants a box full of tacks, he emptied the tacks onto the desk as shown below.
The candle problem presented differently.
Can you guess what happened?
This time, the participants vying for the reward solved the problem faster than their counterparts. Why? By removing the tacks and displaying the empty box, Glucksberg essentially revealed the solution. He transformed a challenging right-brain task into a routine left-brain one. Since participants simply had to race down an obvious path, the carrot waiting for them at the finish line encouraged them to gallop faster.
Glucksberg’s experiment provides the first question you should ask when contemplating external motivators: Is the task at hand routine? That is, does accomplishing it require following a prescribed set of rules to a specified end?
For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects. In some ways, that’s just common sense. As Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Richard Koestner explain, “Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”1 Likewise, when Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted their Madurai, India, performance study with a group of MIT students, they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.” But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”2
This is extremely important. Although advanced economies now revolve less around those algorithmic, rule-based functions, some of what we do each day—especially on the job—still isn’t all that interesting. We have TPS reports to fill out and boring e-mail to answer and all manner of drudge work that doesn’t necessarily fire our soul. What’s more, for some people, much of what they do all day consists of these routine, not terribly captivating, tasks. In these situations, it’s best to try to unleash the positive side of the Sawyer Effect by attempting to turn work into play—to increase the task’s variety, to make it more like a game, or to use it to help master other skills. Alas, that’s not always possible. And this means that sometimes, even “if-then” rewards are an option.
Let’s put this insight about rewards and routines into practice. Suppose you’re a manager at a small nonprofit organization. Your design team created a terrific poster promoting your group’s next big event. And now you need to send the poster to twenty thousand members of your organization. Since the costs of outsourcing the job to a professional mailing firm are too steep for your budget, you decide to do the work in-house. Trouble is, the posters came back from the printer much later than you expected and they need to get in the mail this weekend.
What’s the best way to enlist your staff of ten, and maybe a few others, in a massive weekend poster mailing session? The task is the very definition of routine: The people participating must roll up the posters, slide them into the mailing tubes, cap those tubes, and apply a mailing label and the proper postage. Four steps—none of them notably interesting.
One managerial option is coercion. If you’re the boss, you could force people to spend their Saturday and Sunday on this mind-numbing project. They might comply, but the damage to their morale and long-term commitment could be substantial. Another option is to ask for volunteers. But face it: Most people can think of far better ways to spend a weekend.
So in this case, an “if-then” reward might be effective. For instance, you could promise a big office-wide party if everybody pitches in on the project. You could offer a gift certificate to everyone who participates. Or you could go further and pay people a small sum for every poster they insert, enclose, and send—in the hope that the piecework fee will boost their productivity.
While such tangible, contingent rewards can often undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity, those drawbacks matter less here. The assignment neither inspires deep passion nor requires deep thinking. Carrots, in this case, won’t hurt and might help. And you’ll increase your chances of success by supplementing the poster-packing rewards with three important practices:• Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary.A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose. Explain why this poster is so important and why sending it out now is critical to your organization’s mission.
• Acknowledge that the task is boring.This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when “if-then” rewards are part of how your organization operates.
• Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it—how each poster must be rolled and how each mailing label must be affixed—give them freedom over how they do the job.
That’s the approach for routine tasks. What about for other sorts of undertakings?
For work that requires more than just climbing, rung by rung, up a ladder of instructions, rewards are more perilous. The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—that we’ll explore later in the book. But in the workplace, a rigid adherence to this approach bumps up against a fact of life: Even people who do groovy, creative, right-brain work still want to be paid. And here Teresa Amabile has shed some light on how to use rewards in a way that reckons with life’s realities but reduces extrinsic motivators’ hidden costs.
Go back to the study in which Amabile and two colleagues compared the quality of commissioned and noncommissioned paintings from a group of artists. A panel of experts, blind to what the investigators were exploring, consistently rated the noncommissioned artwork as more creative.
One reason is that several artists said their commissions were “constraining”—that they found themselves working toward a goal they didn’t endorse in a manner they didn’t control. However, in the same study, Amabile also discovered that when the artists considered their commissions “enabling”—that is, “the commission enabled the artist to do something interesting or exciting”3—the creativity ranking of what they produced shot back up. The same was true for commissions the artists felt provided them with useful information and feedback about their ability.
This is a crucial research insight. The science shows that it is possible—though tricky—to incorporate rewards into nonroutine, more creative settings without causing a cascade of damage.
So suppose we’re back at your nonprofit nine months later. The mailing went out flawlessly. The poster was a hit. The event was a smash. You’re planning another for later this year. You’ve settled on the date and found your venue. Now you need an inspiring poster to captivate imaginations and draw a crowd.
What should you do?
Here’s what you shouldn’t do: Offer an “if-then” reward to the design staff. Do not stride into their offices and announce: “If you come up with a poster that rocks my world or that boosts attendance over last year, then you’ll get a ten-percent bonus.” Although that motivational approach is common in organizations all over the world, it’s a recipe for reduced performance. Creating a poster isn’t routine. It requires conceptual, breakthrough, artistic thinking. And as we’ve learned, “if-then” rewards are an ideal way to squash this sort of thinking.
Your best approach is to have already established the conditions of a genuinely motivating environment. The baseline rewards must be sufficient. That is, the team’s basic compensation must be adequate and fair—particularly compared with people doing similar work for similar organizations. Your nonprofit must be a congenial place to work. And the people on your team must have autonomy, they must have ample opportunity to pursue mastery, and their daily duties must relate to a larger purpose. If these elements are in place, the best strategy is to provide a sense of urgency and significance—and then get out of the talent’s way.
But you may still be able to boost performance a bit—more for future tasks than for this one—through the delicate use of rewards. Just be careful. Your efforts will backfire unless the rewards you offer meet one essential requirement. And you’ll be on firmer motivational footing if you follow two additional principles.
The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
Holding out a prize at the beginning of a project—and offering it as a contingency—will inevitably focus people’s attention on obtaining the reward rather than on attacking the problem. But introducing the subject of rewards after the job is done is less risky.
In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.”
As Deci and his colleagues explain, “If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation.”4
Likewise, Amabile has found in some studies “that the highest levels of creativity were produced by subjects who received a reward as a kind of a bonus.”5 So when the poster turns out great, you could buy the design team a case of beer or even hand them a cash bonus without snuffing their creativity. The team didn’t expect any extras and getting them didn’t hinge on a particular outcome. You’re simply offering your appreciation for their stellar work. But keep in mind one ginormous caveat: Repeated “now that” bonuses can quickly become expected “if-then” entitlements—which can ultimately crater effective performance.
At this point, by limiting rewards for nonroutine, creative work to the unexpected, “now that” variety, you’re in less dangerous waters. But you’ll do even better if you follow two more guidelines.
First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”6 So if the folks on the design team turn out a show-stopping poster, maybe just walk into their offices and say, “Wow. You really did an amazing job on that poster. It’s going to have a huge impact on getting people to come to this event. Thank you.” It sounds small and simple, but it can have an enormous effect.
Second, provide useful information. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, “informational or enabling motivators can be conducive” to it.7 In the workplace, people are thirsting to learn about how they’re doing, but only if the information isn’t a tacit effort to manipulate their behavior. So don’t tell the design team: “That poster was perfect. You did it exactly the way I asked.” Instead, give people meaningful information about their work. The more feedback focuses on specifics (“great use of color”)—and the more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome—the more effective it can be.
In brief, for creative, right-brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering “if-then” rewards. You’re better off using “now that” rewards. And you’re best off if your “now that” rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.
(For a visual depiction of this approach, see the flowchart on the next page.)
When to Use Rewards: A Simple Flowchart
CHAPTER 3
Type I and Type X
Rochester, New York, is an unlikely epicenter for a social earthquake. The companies that built this stolid city, just sixty-two miles from the Canadian border, were titans of the industrial economy. Eastman Kodak made film. Western Union delivered telegrams. Xerox produced photocopiers. And they piloted their enterprises by the precepts of Motivation 2.0: If you offer people steady employment and carefully calibrated rewards, they’ll do what executives and shareholders want, and everyone will prosper.
But starting in the 1970s, on the campus of the University of Rochester, a motivational revolution was brewing. It began in 1971, when Edward Deci, fresh from his Soma puzzle experiments, arrived on campus for a joint appointment in the psychology department and the business school. It intensified in 1973, when the business school unceremoniously booted Deci because of his heretical findings about rewards, and the psychology department hired him full-time. It gathered more steam in 1975, when Deci published a book called Intrinsic Motivation. And it launched in earnest in 1977, when a student named Richard Ryan showed up for graduate school.
Ryan, a philosophy major in college, had just missed being drafted into the military. Nursing a bit of survivor’s guilt, he’d been working with Vietnam War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And he’d come to the University of Rochester to learn how to become a better clinician. One day, in a seminar, a professor brought up the subject of intrinsic motivation—and then denounced it with table-pounding ferocity. “I figured that if there was that much resistance, this must be something interesting,” Ryan told me. He picked up a copy of Deci’s book, found it compelling, and asked its author to lunch. So commenced a remarkable research collaboration that continues to this day.
When I met them not long ago, in U of R’s blocky Meliora Hall, the two were a study in both contrast and similarity. Deci is tall and reedy, with a pale complexion and thin, wispy hair. He speaks in a quiet, soothing voice that reminded me of the late American children’s television host Mr. Rogers. Ryan, who has straight white hair parted down the middle, is ruddier and more intense. He presses his point like a skilled litigator. Deci, meanwhile, waits patiently for you to reach his point—then he agrees with you and praises your insight. Deci is
the classical music station on your FM dial; Ryan is more cable TV. And yet they talk to each other in a cryptic academic shorthand, their ideas smoothly in sync. The combination has been powerful enough to make them among the most influential behavioral scientists of their generation.
Together Deci and Ryan have fashioned what they call “self-determination theory.”
Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts. SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.1 “If there’s anything [fundamental] about our nature, it’s the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it,” Ryan explained during one of our conversations. Put another way, we’ve all got that third drive. It’s part of what it means to be human. But whether that aspect of our humanity emerges in our lives depends on whether the conditions around us support it.
And the main mechanisms of Motivation 2.0 are more stifling than supportive. “This is a really big thing in management,” says Ryan. When people aren’t producing, companies typically resort to rewards or punishment. “What you haven’t done is the hard work of diagnosing what the problem is. You’re trying to run over the problem with a carrot or a stick,” Ryan explains. That doesn’t mean that SDT unequivocally opposes rewards. “Of course, they’re necessary in workplaces and other settings,” says Deci. “But the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that’s when they’re most demotivating.” Instead, Deci and Ryan say we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish.
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