Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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

Lakhani and Wolf uncovered a range of motives, but they found that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.

When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.

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

In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward - and no further.

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable.

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.

A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychologic... See more

“People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”