In the Pink

Dan Pink is a guy who makes his living assessing and encouraging motivation. He has TED talks and is a speaker and writer.

According to Mr. Pink, monetary incentives work best for repetitive, rules-based jobs. Yet those  motivators where  monetary rewards are linked to performance often reduce productivity in cognitive and creative jobs. People under such incentives take longer and achieve inferior results.

Researchers all over the world reproduce this finding consistently in different cultures and industries. They’ve put people in all kinds of test situations, and the same happens every time.

The reason, Pink says, is that bonuses, commissions, and the like make you narrow your focus. You concentrate on delivering the results that will give you the reward.

That’s fine in jobs like manual labor, certain kinds of accounting, some computer programming, and financial analysis. Maybe not so fine elsewhere.

In a recent TED talk, Pink said: "And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach."

If sweeter carrots aren’t the right motivator in today’s jobs, what is? Pink says we all want three things:

• Autonomy—the urge to direct our own lives

• Mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters

• Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

If you wonder where money fits into that, it’s part of autonomy. People want to be comfortable and independent. Pink says wise employers get the money question off the table immediately. Pay people a fair wage, then start motivating them in other ways.