Motivation in the workplace

Mandy put me on to these TED talks. Here’s one from Dan Pink who has a new book on Motivation coming out this fall.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Pink wrote a book on creativity (A Whole New Brain), which Rick quoted approvingly in his Gateway text. The argument there is that left brain thinking was more useful for a 19th/20th century industrial age while right brain thinking is more useful for our 21st century knowledge-worker age (not that far off from Drucker’s ideas, by the way). I’m reading that book right now, and I’m only partly persuaded (mostly because it seems to me that it’s still a bunch of left-brain types like the Google guys who are analyzing the quirkiness of our right-brain elements in order to create systems that will accommodate for that quirkiness).

But given that “right brain types rule the world” assumption, Pink argues that our typical organizational model of performance-based evaluations and rewards is problematic. These “extrinsic” motivating techniques typically work only in very narrow contexts in which the goal is clear and the means to that goal are even clearer. Because that method worked so well for our industrial age and for much of our sports world, we’ve come to assume that it will work everywhere. It doesn’t. In fact, the higher the reward offered for any cognitively complex assignment, the lower the performance. Creativity is what is needed, but creativity is dampened when given a clear goal and a clear path to that goal. We get tunnel vision.

Better instead to focus on intrinsic motivation. This sounds familiar to the arguments made by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational, which I summarized awhile back. In fact, Pink quotes from Ariely in this TED talk. To heighten our intrinsic motivation, we should emphasize autonomy (allowing for more self motivation and less direct supervision), mastery (our desire to constantly improve), and purpose (our sense of calling to a higher goal). Ariely focused on the third piece (people are more motivated by a “cause” than they are by money). Pink focuses here on the first piece and notes the success of Wikipedia in comparison to Microsoft’s Encarta program.

Pink then suggests as a consequence of this thinking such ideas as Google’s 20% time (do whatever you want related to the company with 20% of your time) or a system called ROWE (results oriented work environment where people have no set work hours only project goals that they can complete how and when they want). I’m not exactly sure how to apply some of these ideas to our academic context, since we already do a lot of this on the faculty side by the very nature of faculty work. In fact, I kept thinking throughout that these arguments are really an inversion of the usual conversation in which business types tell academic types how to run their organizations whereas here we have academic types telling business types that their business models are skewed and that they should look instead more like academic organizations.

But I will say that some of these arguments challenge my very left-brained, competitive convictions. For example, I’m not quite sure what to think about Kent State’s new bonus pay system. It’s certainly too beholden to the faculty union, for one, and it’s not clear they’ve done much study about the correlations involved, but I appreciate that it’s a “group bonus” targeted at institutional goals. That seems more in keeping with the concepts noted above. As someone who’s argued for a long time that we need more “bonus pay” type systems at JBU, I’ll have to give these issues more thought.

http://chronicle.com/article/Kent-State-Says-It-Will-Pay/48768/