Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Two intriguing examples demonstrate what I mean. First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and happiness is weak—that past a certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn’t bring people a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have begun adding a bit more nuance to this observation. According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn, sociologists at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than a bauble for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.11 In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning their findings on what they call “pro-social” spending into corporate policy. According to The Boston Globe, they believe that “companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.”12 In other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more “if-then” financial incentive.