On Motivation
I’ve read a number of articles on compensation, and the general theme I’ve taken away is that people perform to the metric they’re measured against. In software, this means that if a developer is ranked by how many bugs s/he fixes, the developer will concentrate on maintenance tasks. If a QA person is ranked by the number of issues opened, that employee will focus on opening a lot of issues. And so on. Joel Spolsky has skewered the idea of performance reviews and incentive pay, and has a number of other articles on his philosophy of compensation, and he cites Peopleware and a few other articles to back up his claims.
Today’s piece in the NYT What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? continues on that theme. It’s no secret that at the executive level, compensation and performance are not linked. It’s certainly obvious that large compensation packages are certainly not a sufficient, and probably not a necessary, condition for excellent performance. So Dan Ariely’s results with respect to compensation aren’t surprising. What is surprising to me is his results with respect to public recognition:
We asked 39 participants to solve anagram puzzles, sometimes privately in a cubicle and sometimes in front of the others. We reasoned that their motivation to do well would be higher in public, and we wanted to see if this would affect their performance. But we found that while the subjects wanted to perform better when they worked in front of others, in fact they did worse.
It’s a pretty interesting result. I think that the lesson here is that the motivation to excel is essentially internal, and the whole idea of “motivating” employees is a futile exercise. It seems to me that maybe the best thing an employer can do is strive to not dis-incentivize employees.
— Gordon Weakliem
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