Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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

“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.”

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

They can extinguish intrinsic motivation. They can diminish performance. They can crush creativity. They can crowd out good behavior. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. They can become addictive. They can foster short-term thinking.

Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice - which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to... See more

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.

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

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

One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards.

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