Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.

Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion.

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.

It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.

Type I’s don’t turn down raises or refuse to cash paychecks. But one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself.

According to a raft of studies from SDT researchers, people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are extrinsically motivated. By

Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.

to Gunther, who’s in his early thirties. “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.

Yet too many businesses remain woefully behind the science. Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players.

Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.

Ever wonder why lawyers, as a group, are so miserable? Some social scientists have—and they’ve offered three explanations. One involves pessimism. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.”

“There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer.11 A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.

In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it. The deprivation starts early. A 2007 study of two American law schools found that over the three-year period in school, students’ overall well-being plummeted—in large part because their need for autonomy was thwarted. But students who had greater autonomy over their course selection, their assignments, and their relations with professors showed far less steep declines and

Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time.

As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible).

These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative...

behavior. “If one is expected to bill more than two thousand hours per year,” former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once said, “there are bound to be temptat...

But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.

The company explains its vacation non-policy like this: “We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked.”

“No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.”

Ample research has shown that people working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.

Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.

Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement.

People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/).

One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do.

“Even in low-autonomy jobs,” Wrzesniewski and Dutton write, “employees can create new domains for mastery.”7

We know from statisticians that demographics is destiny. And we know from the Rolling Stones that you can’t always get what you want.

Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation. Instead they choose a range of nonmonetary factors—from “a great team” to “the ability to give back to society through work.”

“They” companies and “we” companies, he says, are very different places.9

People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that what they do contributes to a larger whole. And a powerful way to provide that context is to spend a little less time telling how and a little more time showing why.

Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “almost none” and 10 meaning “a huge amount”):

1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work—your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day? 2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work—for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day? 3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work—that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate? 4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how

you actually perform the main responsibiliti...