Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Adam Grant, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, discovered in a study of call center representatives. Grant obtained permission to talk to people making calls for a university fundraising operation, and divided his participants into three groups. One group, each night before they made calls, read brief stories from previous employees about the personal benefits of working in this job—earning money, developing communication skills, and so on. The second group also read stories before hitting the phones, but theirs were from people who had received scholarships from the funds raised and who described how the money had improved their lives. The third group was the control group; they worked as they usually did, reading no stories before dialing for dollars. Participants were also told not to discuss what they’d read with the recipients of their calls. What happened? The people in the group reminded of the personal benefit of working in a call center were no more successful in raising money than those in the control group. But the people in the second group, who read about what their work accomplished, raised more than twice as much money, through twice as many pledges, as the other groups. A brief reminder of the purpose of their work doubled their performance.