Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

ALSO BY DANIEL H. PINK Free Agent Nation A Whole New Mind The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

To answer the question, Harlow offered a novel theory—what amounted to a third drive: “The performance of the task,” he said, “provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it.

“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.

“It was controversial,” Deci told me one spring morning forty years after the Soma experiments. “Nobody was expecting rewards would have a negative effect.”

On October 31, 2009, Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN Encarta, its disc and online encyclopedia, which had been on the market for sixteen years. Meanwhile, Wikipedia—that second model—ended up becoming the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world. Just nine years after its inception, Wikipedia had more than 17 million articles in some 270 languages, including 3.5 million in English alone.1 What happened? The conventional view of human motivation has a very hard time explaining this result.

Meanwhile, W. Edwards Deming, whose work was embraced in Japan with the same ferocity with which it was ignored in the U.S., argued that the route to quality and continual improvement was intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivators like bonuses, incentive plans, and forced rankings. Thanks in part to McGregor, Herzberg, and Deming, companies evolved a bit. Dress codes relaxed, schedules became more flexible. Many organizations looked for ways to grant employees greater autonomy and to help them grow.

Our current operating system has become far less compatible with, and at times downright antagonistic to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.

An L3C in North Carolina, for instance, is buying abandoned furniture factories in the state, updating them with green technology, and leasing them back to beleaguered furniture manufacturers at a low rate. The venture hopes to make money, but its real purpose is to help revitalize a struggling region.

Give us a choice of two television sets, we’ll pick one; toss in an irrelevant third choice, and we’ll pick the other. In short, we are irrational—and predictably so, says economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.

We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose. We work to master the clarinet on weekends although we have little hope of making a dime (Motivation 2.0) or acquiring a mate (Motivation 1.0) from doing so. We play with puzzles even when we don’t get a few raisins or dollars for solving them.

As Frey writes, “Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.”8

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. Those sorts of challenges—solving novel problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing—depend heavily on Harlow’s third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, which holds, in part: “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.”11 In other words, the central tenets of Motivation 2.0 may actually impair performance of the heuristic, right-brain work on which modern economies depend.

One business leader, who didn’t want to be identified, said it plainly. When he conducts job interviews, he tells prospective employees: “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.”

CHAPTER 2 Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work

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

When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “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.

Let’s circle back to this conclusion for a moment. Four economists—two from MIT, one from Carnegie Mellon, and one from the University of Chicago—undertake research for the Federal Reserve System, one of the most powerful economic actors in the world. But instead of affirming a simple business principle—higher rewards lead to higher performance—they seem to refute it.

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.

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.

CARROTS AND STICKS: The Seven Deadly Flaws 1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation. 2. They can diminish performance. 3. They can crush creativity. 4. They can crowd out good behavior. 5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. 6. They can become addictive. 7. They can foster short-term thinking.

While such tangible, contingent rewards can often undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity, those drawbacks matter less here. The assignment neither inspires deep passion nor requires deep thinking. Carrots, in this case, won’t hurt and might help. And you’ll increase your chances of success by supplementing the poster-packing rewards with three important practices:

Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose. Explain why this poster is so important and why sending it out now is critical to your organization’s mission. • Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when “if-then” rewards are part of how your organization operates. • Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it—how each poster must be rolled and how each mailing label must be affixed—give them freedom over how they do the job.

Now you need an inspiring poster to captivate imaginations and draw a crowd.

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.

The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.

In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.”

But keep in mind one ginormous caveat: Repeated “now that” bonuses can quickly become expected “if-then” entitlements—which can ultimately crater effective performance.

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

Second, provide useful information.

give people meaningful information about their work. The more feedback focuses on specifics (“great use of color”)—and the more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome—the more effective it can be.

Friedman, who died in 2001 at the ripe old age of ninety, was a cardiologist who for decades ran a bustling office in San Francisco. 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 I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that’s not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn’t assist in mastery—which is the source of achievement over the long haul. The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.

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.

Part Two The Three Elements

Autonomy

At the beginning of the year, Gunther launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius, one of a trio of companies he runs. He turned the company, which creates computer software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information systems, into a ROWE—a results-only work environment. ROWEs are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE’s principles marry the commonsense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.

he decided against tying those goals to compensation. “That creates a culture that says it’s all about the money and not enough about the work.” Money, he believes, is only “a threshold motivator.” People must be paid well and be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don’t much affect performance and motivation.

Deci and Ryan cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs. And of the three, it’s the most important—the

just consider the very notion of “empowerment.” It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy. That’s just a slightly more civilized form of control.

THE FOUR ESSENTIALS

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

Task

Autonomy over task is one of the essential aspects of the Motivation 3.0 approach to work.

Time

“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.”

Technique

Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com (now part of Amazon.com), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn’t for them and want to leave, he’ll pay them $2,000—no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He’s using an “if-then” reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren’t fit for a Motivation 3.0–style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. When a call comes in, here’s their job: Serve the customer. No scripts. No monitoring. No timing of calls either. If a call takes one minute, great; if it takes one hour, no problem.

“homeshoring.”

Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center, they’re routing the calls to the employees’ homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.

Team