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I've never seen good results from coercion (such as threats, bribery, or punishment) in a workplace, and I'm suspicious of rewards, which seem like another form of bribery. Deception also seems deadly.

As you point out, autonomy, mastery and meaning are motivating, and their absence de-motivating. Coercion undermines autonomy.

It also seems that people's work suffers greatly when they are unhappy, stressed, fearful, overloaded, or fatigued.

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Yeah, I think that there is a deep cultural bias against actually digging in and looking at human problems, like work, from a human-centric perspective. There's a presupposition that most people hold that management is about control. This is why we draw org-charts top-down. In my view, management is about support. I prefer to draw org-charts bottom-up. The CEO is at the bottom. The whole structure is there to support the effort of those at the tips of the branches, the individual contributors.

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