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

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.

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

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

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.

“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.”

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

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.

Human beings have an inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn. But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive.