“People work predominantly for a reward”. Many
MBA students hear and then use in order to control workers’ performance.
Motivation is an enigmatic thing. In different
types of organizations managers all around the world struggle to motivate
employees to get the best out of them.
And this is a crucial activity on all levels of an organization.
Being a boss does not necessarily mean being a
good leader or motivator. There are countless examples reporting intolerable
task masters, or ultimate micro-manager, or even horrid manager thus creating
a horrible work environment... and the list goes on and on. This kind of a boss
is definitely not favored by employees and no motivation comes from him/her.
Instead, workers are deeply demotivated by injustices, emptiness of demands,
inconsistencies, lack of transparency, self-importance, arrogance, superiority,
miss-communication, or even management incompetence. They just try to survive. Still,
some of these bosses climb the current Forbes 400 list.
Although a lot of researches show that ignoring
other peoples’ work is as bad as shredding it, we still do it. Is the reason
why in our simplistic way of thinking why do people work? We mostly believe
that people at work care just about the money and as soon as we give or take it
they “retaliate” one way or another. At jobs that demand cognitive skills a higher
reward often leads to poorer performances, say the researches.
In uncertain times companies complain about
productivity. If factory workers, builders or any other people that don’t
require creative thinking are paid more, they are generally more productive. 
With people where creativity is a predominant
component of a job we need a different approach. In the book “Irrationality”
psychologist Stuart Sutherland reveals the fundamental questions about the role
of reward. Both, psychologists and laymen, tend to assume that if you want to
get people to do something, rewarding them, whether by praise, sweets or money,
is the best way to go about it. In the short run, this may be true. But this
goes against one major psychological theory of motivation that alleges: if
people are rewarded for some activity, the desire to engage in it will
eventually become autonomous. They will be motivated to perform that activity
even without reward.
People like “to fight” and have challenges. It
motivates them. The motivation can take on most, if not all, obstacles. In
businesses it is very important to be open-minded and be able to think
differently in order to solve problems of rewarding people and giving the
meaning to their work. Therefore, as Dan Gilbert said in his TED talk: “In
pre-industrial area Adam Smith was right about efficiency but not now in
Knowledge-economy where Karl Marx is right about motivating by meaning!”
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