One of my favorite TED talks comes from a man named Daniel Pink. What Daniel talks about in the above video is the puzzle of motivation; basically, why financial incentives for employees (extrinsic incentives) will have a negative effect on success. As a matter of fact, employees are more successful given no financial incentive to complete a task.
Think about this: You all most remember Encarta, which was developed my Google. Google hired top notch employees to make this online encyclopedia. Now think of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by everyday people who have intrinsic motivation to continue to add to Wikipedia. Which encyclopedia is more successful today in 2012? This is because people with intrinsic motivation enjoy what they are doing more than people who have extrinsic motivation. Everyone who contributes to Wikipedia does so because they enjoy it, none of them are paid.
What science has taught us is that the more financial incentive someone is given to complete a task, the more narrow minded they become. A person who has a high financial incentive will stick to the same idea, even if it is wrong, to try to complete the task as fast as possible. A person who has no financial incentive is proven to be able to complete the task faster, because they try different techniques and are more open minded to complete the task.
So what does money do to business? It still makes us happy, but it is not necessarily a motivator for work. It can cause things such as willful blindness, and actually make us less successful than someone who is intrinsically motivated. Overall, we must find what make us intrinsically motivated in order to be successful in the business world, because as science shows, money is no longer cutting it.
Cheers,
Dustin Caissie
