Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote.5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.

Chapter 3 will introduce what I call “Type I” behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounded in the real science of human motivation and powered by our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create

Humans are more than the sum of our biological urges.

McGregor challenged the presumption that humans are fundamentally inert—that absent external rewards and punishments, we wouldn’t do much. People have other, higher drives, he said. And these drives could benefit businesses if managers and business leaders respected

them. Thanks in part to McGregor’s writing, companies

In other words, companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.

People in the open-source movement haven’t taken vows of poverty. For many, participation in these projects can burnish their reputations and sharpen their skills, which can enhance their earning power. Entrepreneurs have launched new, and sometimes lucrative, companies to help organizations implement and maintain open-source software applications.

“that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”

Play a game with me and I’ll try to illustrate the point. Suppose somebody gives me ten dollars and tells me to share it—some, all, or none—with you. If you accept my offer, we both get to keep the money. If you reject it, neither of us gets anything. If I offered you six dollars (keeping four for myself), would you take it? Almost certainly. If I offered you five, you’d probably take that, too. But what if I offered you two dollars? Would you take it? In an experiment replicated around the world, most people rejected offers of two dollars and below.7 That makes no sense in terms of wealth maximization. If you take my offer of two dollars, you’re two dollars richer. If you reject it, you get nothing. Your cognitive calculator knows two is greater than zero—but because you’re a human being, your notions of fair play or your desire for revenge or your simple irritation overrides it.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work.9 A key reason: Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot.

The implications for motivation are vast. Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones.

When rewards and punishments encounter our third drive, something akin to behavioral quantum mechanics seems to take over and strange things begin to happen.

Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call “baseline rewards.” If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of

her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’l...

“If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy. Like the gentlemen driving carriages for money instead of fun, they’re no longer fully controlling their lives. And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.

“Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they determined. “When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and

opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.

“People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”4

Reporting the results for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the researchers wrote, “In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.”5

Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus

and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.

Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are doing a piece for someone else it becomes more “work” than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself—be careful to do what the client wants.8

“Rather than being offered as an ‘ over-the-counter’ salve for boosting performance, goal setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label, and closely monitored,” they wrote.16 Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.

“Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior.” The examples are legion, the researchers note. Sears imposes a sales quota on its auto repair staff—and workers respond by overcharging customers and completing unnecessary repairs. Enron sets lofty revenue goals—and the race to meet them by any means possible catalyzes the company’s collapse. Ford is so intent on producing a certain car at a certain weight at a certain price by a certain date that it omits safety checks and unleashes the dangerous Ford Pinto. The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.

In fact, the business school professors suggest they should come with their own warning label: Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.

Up pops another bug in Motivation 2.0. One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers—who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters

wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine—like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment—edged aside that third drive.

According to these scholars, cash rewards and shiny trophies can provide a delicious jolt of pleasure at first, but the feeling soon dissipates—and to keep it alive, the recipient requires ever larger and more frequent doses.

“Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.” And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.20

which, in turn, affect executives’ compensation. But companies pay a steep price for not extending their gaze beyond the next quarter. Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently. (One reason: The earnings-obsessed companies typically invest less in research and development.)

Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first—but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.

little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”1 Likewise, when Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted their Madurai, India, performance study with a group of MIT students, they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.” But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”

Although advanced economies now revolve less around those algorithmic, rule-based functions, some of what we do each day—especially on the job—still isn’t all that interesting. We have TPS reports to fill out and boring e-mail to answer and all manner of drudge work that doesn’t necessarily fire our soul. What’s more,

for some people, much of what they do all day consists of these routine, not terribly captivating, tasks. In these situations, it’s best to try to unleash the positive side of the Sawyer Effect by attempting to turn work into play—to increase the task’s variety, to make it more like a game, or to use it to help master other skills.

For work that requires more than just climbing, rung by rung, up a ladder of instructions, rewards are more perilous. The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—that we’ll explore later in the book.

Your best approach is to have already established the conditions of a genuinely motivating environment. The baseline rewards must be sufficient. That is, the team’s basic compensation must be adequate and fair—particularly compared with people doing similar work for similar organizations. Your nonprofit must be a congenial place to work. And the people on your team must have autonomy, they must have ample opportunity to pursue mastery, and their daily duties must relate to a larger purpose. If these elements are in place, the best strategy is to provide a sense of urgency and significance—and then get out of the talent’s way.

First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.

Second, provide useful information. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, “informational or enabling motivators can be conducive”

One day, in a seminar, a professor brought up the subject of intrinsic motivation—and then denounced it with table-pounding ferocity. “I figured that if there was that much resistance, this must be something interesting,” Ryan told me.

Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts. SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

“This is a really big thing in management,” says Ryan. When people aren’t producing, companies typically resort to rewards or punishment. “What you haven’t done is the hard work of diagnosing what the problem is. You’re trying to run over the problem with a carrot or a stick,”

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

In the late 1950s, he and fellow physician Ray Rosenman began noticing similarities in their patients who were prone to heart disease. It wasn’t only what these patients ate or what genes they inherited that affected their susceptibility to coronary trouble. It was also how they led their lives. These patients, Friedman noted, demonstrated: a particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competition drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and a harrying sense of time urgency. Individuals displaying this pattern seem to be engaged in a chronic, ceaseless, and often fruitless struggle—with themselves, with others, with circumstances, with time, sometimes with life itself.2

Type A behavior stood in contrast to—natch—Type B behavior. Unlike their horn-honking, foot-tapping counterparts, who suffered from “hurry sickness,” people displaying Type B behavior were rarely harried by life or made hostile by its demands. In their research, Friedman and Rosenman found that Type B people were just as intelligent, and frequently just as ambitious, as Type A’s.

One key to reducing deaths from heart disease and improving public health, therefore, was to help Type A’s learn to become a little more like Type B’s.

McGregor said there was an alternative view of employees—one that offered a more accurate assessment of the human condition and a more effective starting point for running companies. This perspective held that taking an interest in work is “as natural as play or rest,” that creativity and ingenuity were widely distributed in the population, and that under the proper conditions, people will accept, and even seek, responsibility.

If you believed in the “mediocrity of the masses,” as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve. But if your starting point was Theory Y, the possibilities were vast—not simply for the individual’s potential, but for the company’s bottom line as well. The way to make business organizations work better, therefore, was to shift management thinking away from Theory X and toward Theory Y.

The Motivation 2.0 operating system depended on, and fostered, what I call Type X behavior. Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones.

The Motivation 3.0 operating system—the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organize, think about, and do what we do—depends on what I call Type I behavior. Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones.

I don’t mean to say that Type X people always neglect the inherent enjoyment of what they do—or that Type I people resist outside goodies of any kind. But for Type X’s, the main motivator is external rewards; any deeper satisfaction is welcome, but secondary. For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.