Business Psychology : Shift In Motivation Spectrum
Do you always do what you say you’re going to do? or what you think is right? well, the answer is no. There could be multiple reasons for that like behavior, attitude, fear, or motivation. A few days back, I attended a webinar where I learned about how incentives and punishments can affect decisions. This triggered me to explore more on “Why businesses use incentives and punishments?”, the answer I found was, to motivate employees. But does it works?
Let’s take a look at this Duncker’s candle problem. The participant gets a box of thumbtacks, a book of matches, and a candle. His job is to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax does not drip onto the table.
Now, what would you do, many people try to thumbtack the candle to the wall, but it doesn’t work. Some have a great idea, they try to melt the candle from the side and then tried to adhere it to the wall, awesome idea but it doesn’t work either. However, eventually after 5–10 mins most people figure out the solution to the problem.
The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. Here the thumbtacks box, which was originally meant to keep the thumbtacks, could also be used as a platform for the candle.
Now, let’s come back to the topic, this candle problem was used by a scientist Sam Glucksberg in his experiment, which shows the power of incentives. He gathered a bunch of people and divided them into two groups. To one group he said, “I am going to time you and find out averages of how long it takes to solves this problem”. To the second group, he offered rewards and said, “ I am going to give $20 to the first ten people who solve it in the least time”. In 1962, it was decent money for minutes of work. Now the question is “How much faster does the second group solves the problem?”. The results were shocking, it took three and a half minutes longer by the second group on an average.
This makes no sense, that’s not how it suppose to work, right? if you want people to work better you reward them, but that’s not happening here, it does the opposite. And it happened again and again, which proves that contingent motivators don’t work. However, in some cases, it does work, where the task is either purely mechanical or directive with straight forward instructions.
This is one of the most robust findings in business psychology and one of the most ignored. What’s alarming here is that there is a mismatch between what science tells and what businesses do. Most of the businesses use these extrinsic motivators like incentives, rewards, carrots, and sticks. It works in some circumstances but for a lot of tasks, it either doesn’t work or often do harm.
Glucksberg did a similar experiment with a slight change, this time the thumbtacks were out of the box. Now, it became a pretty straight forward task. This time the group which was offered rewards outperformed the other group. So, the rewards work for simple tasks with specific instructions. Its the nature of the reward system, it narrows our focus and enhances concentrations, that's why they work in some problems. In the western world, there are two kinds of problems, ones that require analysis, counting, have a set goal, and fixed rules, for which they outsource and can get it done at cheaper prices. But when the problems are real, which requires creative, out of the box solutions, this carrot and stick mechanism does not work.
To get out of this, to slove the upcoming 21st-century problems we really need to stop alluring people to the sweeter carrots or threaten them with sticks. There is a solution to this, we need to establish our business operation approach around intrinsic motivators, around the desire to do things because they matter, we need it, we like it and what we do is interesting. Scientists have come up with the new operating system for businesses that revolves around three elements, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
“ Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives
Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose: The desire to do what we do to serves something that is larger than us”