Analysis Of Dan Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life”(Levitt and Dubner 12). Levitt and Dubner once mentioned in their book “Freakonomics”. According to Oxford dictionary, incentives are something tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity (“incentives”). In business field, incentives are something given by bosses to encourage their employees to endeavour in bringing benefits to their business. For a simple example, the employee who hits the monthly or year sales target will get cash or prizes as incentives. Apparently, these incentives are something that motivates employees maintains their great performance and also to motivate other employee, whoever wants to get the incentives, work harder.

Herzberg doesn?t believe in the giving of bonuses in order to increase productivity. Herzberg states that ?Hunger, a basic biological drive makes it necessary to earn money, and then money becomes a specific drive? (Herzberg, 1991, p.16). This means that once employees start being rewarded with money they won?t be able to work without it. Another firm believer of this is Kohn who states, ?When reward systems fail don?t blame the program, look at the promise behind it.? (1993, p.54). Kohns article describes incentives, as only bringing temporary compliance and once the rewards run out people will revert back to their old behaviours.

Motivation is a main point in which I am interested and in order to understand more about the topic I have based my review in 2 different sources: Forbes article “Motivation Mystery: How to Keep Employees Productive” and Daniel Pink Ted Talk “The Puzzle of Motivation”.

Daniel Pink in his book titled Drive talks about the reasons to motivations and how people work to better themselves. There are different reasons to what keeps people motivated. For some it is mastery, to get better at what they do, while for others it may be the reward they are seeking at the end. Both in which have different mindsets mastery is when someone wants to get better at something for there own satisfaction, while for others it is to get satisfaction through their paycheck and profit. Motivation in work forces is money and profit. As long as people are getting what they want productivity continues, however once they stop receiving their rewards productivity decreases. This makes total sense people because as humans, people seek rewards

While watching “The Puzzle of Motivation” by Dan Pink, I was very intrigued. Throughout the entire talk, there were several interesting points that were made. It really interested me when Pink talked about the group that was rewarded. Pink stated that if the contestants were in the top 25% of the fastest times, they would be rewarded five dollars. With this incentive, most would hope to do well, if not better than the person that would not be rewarded. Pink then goes on to point out the results. How much faster did the group that was offered a reward actually do? On average, it took them three and a half minutes longer. This really stood out to me because when offered a reward for a task, normally a person would be more motivated and thus do better. What amazed me even more was that this isn’t just a one time thing. This is has been replicated over and over for nearly 40 years. As Pink says around 04:33, “These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don 't work or, often, they do harm.” These rewards that are being offered are being used to attempt to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, but instead it’s proving to do the opposite. It’s proving to dull thinking and block creativity.

However, because human behavior suggests that rewards motivate people, the manager – Bent - implemented an incentive plan, Scanlon, to boost productivity and sales. Identification and Analysis of Root Causes of Known Organizational Issues The manager chose the Scanlon plan because it engages the employees in decision-making processes and rewards their creativity. Since human beings find it difficult to accept significant changes, the employees showed little enthusiasm in the plan (Wagner III, 2014). Nonetheless, after engagement with workers from another firm that implemented the same plan, it was accepted.

In the video “The Puzzle of Motivation,” Dan Pink explains different ways on how employees can perform better in organizations. For instance, he mentions that the reward-and-punishment way should be avoided in the workplace. Dan Pink believes that the reward-and-punishment approach leaves employees less space for creativity and decrease their chances to think sharp. He announces the “The Candle Problems” studies to support his claim on this approach and explains that inclining more close to intrinsic motivators can be a solution toward how to improve employees performance. Pink mentioned that extrinsic motivators did work well for ‘20th century tasks’ and that it is time to focus in the direction of intrinsic motivators for our modern businesses.

In chapter one of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, author Daniel Pink introduces two types of motivators that he refers to as, “Human operating systems”. Times have changed, and business models are changing as well. Just like we need to upgrade our computer software when it begins to fail. We also need to upgrade our human operating systems, when our current method has not kept up with the ever-changing business world. The concept of reward and punishment to encourage employees to be more productive is an outdated way of managing people. In order to create a better work environment and increase productivity, we need to upgrade our idea of motivation to include autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

“While Mangers complain about lack of motivation in their workers, they might as well consider the possibility that the reward systems they’ve installed are paying off for the opposite”.

There are very many factors that motivate employees to do outstanding work in their jobs. Though most of them are non-monetary factors like participative decision making, work teams, challenging jobs, goals in life or in the company, power and other factors. Most of the employees that emerge in their workplace, either in a small cubicle or a mega office have got some drive that enable them to perform in their work, but the key question is, is money is the key motivation in their workplace? In this essay both sides will be argued in order to find the answer to this (Robbins, Odendaal & Roodt, 2003).

that employees remain motivated if they are rewarded to achieve goals of a company. And when they are

Motivation in the workplace is one of the major concerns that managers face when trying to encourage their employees to work harder and do what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. According to Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn the definition of motivation is "the individual forces that account for the direction, level, and persistence of a person's effort expended at work." They go on to say that "motivation is a key concern in firms across the globe." Through the years there have been several theories as to what motivates employees to do their best at work. In order to better understand these theories we will apply them to a fictitious organization that has the following

Scientific management uses incentives to motivate workers. This idea comes from Henry Gantt who introduced the bonus system, which motivated workers to complete their daily tasks by

Keeping employees motivated in addition to creating incentives and/or additional ways for employees to receive more compensation will create better performance overall within an organization. Contrary if company B gives their employees incentives to perform, without any motivational tactics they probably will not have as many top performances as company A, in addition the company may only seek short term rewards verses have long term success. Lack of motivation for employees within an organization, can cause long term damage for the company’s success. Different things motivate everyone; therefore there should be a system in place to keep employees motivated for the long term success of the company. In the MBM textbook under the concept of incentives, compensation, and motivation, there are a couple of different views of how it should be applied within an organization. We will discuss The Social Role of Profit, Personal Profit and Losses, and the way Market-Based Management view how incentives, compensation, and motivation should be applied and the things that effectively drive employees’ actions while at work.

One of the first authors that dealt with the sources of motivation was Frederick Taylor who focussed on the overall productivity of an organisation. He linked this productivity to the effort an employee puts into their work which in turn is dependent on monetary rewards (Taylor, 1911). This theory was established in the context of the industrial age and thus is outdated for today’s analysis but it still provides a basic assumption which is often referred to by other authors. The total neglecting of a worker’s intrinsic motivators is a starting point for discussion for authors that conducted research in that area after Taylor.