Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator

This was also the topic of Dan Pink's TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html, which came across the RSS feed about 9 hours ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171.

In that presentation, the speaker talked about the candle experiment and some of its variations. He mentions that for purely mechanical skills, rewards indeed have been shown to repeatedly increase productivity. But for non-mechanical tasks, where the task is not immediately solvable or requires calculation, the promise of a reward to the top performer often diminishes the time in which the task is completed.

He didn't mention any deeper analysis though. For instance, one can wonder about the difference in the attitude between the top performers in the reward and non-reward groups. Does a participant get pre-occupied with the fact that they have not solved the problem first, and thereby reduce the amount of attention they are giving to the problem at hand? Do they have the same amount of concentration throughout the task, or after what they perceive to be a "deadline" do they stop caring.

A major difference between Pink's talk and this article is that this posits that the previous questions don't matter. Instead, it hints at the fact that once any reward is offered, the work done suffers because it diminishes one's intrinsic motivation. I wonder if this can be tested against the hypothesis that the reward becomes an object measuring stick to the quality of work; while another person's respect or praise might not be as easily objectified and measured motivating one to do more work.

It's a little more subtle than Kohn admits, however. While promises of rewards ahead of time evoke feelings of bribery or coercion, a system where praise and rewards are often the "natural outcome" serve as great motivation. Consider the products specializing in making things fun/addicting - video games. WoW throws in as many "rewards" as possible - hell, even changing your password is rewarded: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/404957/Picture%2039.png

Highly recommend further reading: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071351450/

Alfie Kohn's "No Contest" is also a great read in the same vein: http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp...

There's little doubt that the motivation crowding-out effect [1] exists. However, before one runs around, saying that rewards are "often no motivator", one should remember the basic premise of these studies:

"People were intrinsically motivated to complete a certain task, initially."

In many economic contexts, this is seldomly the case. How many people are intrinsically motivated to fix a broken toilet, for example?

True, it may hold under certain circumstances -- so-called creative and similar work.

But developing software is not just creative work. There's also lots of boilerplate work to do to make software a good product: It needs to satisfy the wants and needs of the user, not the developer. It needs to be easy-to-use. It needs informative and reassuring promotion (ie. a nice homepage). It needs proper documentation. It needs to be easily installable and removable.

But even Free Software developers are not intrinsically motivated to provide these features. Thus, many Free Software projects fail badly as products.

Sure, there may be people out there who are intrinsically motivated to do some of these tasks - writing, for example. But when they are, they often have better things to create, namely their own creative works. Why should anyone who enjoys to write, care about the lack of documentation for some unknown software project, even if it's "Free"?

This is why so-called "non-free software" is useful and necessary and hardly anything "immoral" or "unethical": It provides benefits lots of people want and need.

In other words: I doubt, the GNU project posted this on their web site to educate the public. Probably, they just did it to support their political agenda.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory

Let me rebut: the problem is not with existence of rewards, the problem is the size of the rewards. Employees who are merely praised for their good work are demotivated because they realize that praise is all they will likely receive in the near future - they had been hoping for a raise, the assurance of a raise, or an opportunity to advance their career.

Case in point: in the finance industry, employees work very hard and are not praised. They are also paid very well, and their pay is usually tied to their performance except in 2008 when everyone got a huge bonus in spite of the meltdown.

I find this strange. I'm not going to completely discount the study, but I would like to counter - with capitalism itself.

Capitalism enforces the reward concept so effectively, that every now and then we almost collectively implode exchanging rewards. The system works too well, if anything.

Aside from that, the only thing this shows is that people who enjoy the task in question will do a better job than those who do not. Well, duh. A talent is a combination of skill and enjoyment - of course they will outperform someone who is simply assigned a task.

That doesn't mean rewards don't encourage behaviour, it just means that you can't pay for passion.

This matches my own experience exactly. I've often felt more demotivated the more someone threw incentives at me to finish something and I've tried to explain, but it's like there's a mental block there and no one wants to admit that this could possibly be true.

Truly excellent article. Thanks for sharing. This is the kind of stuff I hope for every time I refresh Hacker News.

How is reputation different from praise? Isn't reputation one of the main motivators for participation on Free and Open Source software? Also, if we look at sites like perlmonks, stackoverflow, slashdot, reddit etc, karma they are all about points and levels.

Thats true, and I find that true in my own work, but low compensation also turns someone off just as much.

As long as your programmer feels they are being paid a fair amount, give them fun work to do and they'll slave away at it like billions of dollars are going to come out of it.