Daniel Pink : Motivation goes beyond rewards

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Daniel Pink surprised me with the statement that "Money does not motivate rather is counter productive to creativity". The first question that comes to mind is that what motivates then? The answers to this question has been explored / researched by Daniel Pink over the years. What he comes up is in the video and wonderful books. The idea of rewards works for mechanical tasks, working in the carrot-stick reward-punish system. If you work well you will receive rewards otherwise you will be punished. As soon as the work required rudimentary cognitive skills the larger rewards actually bog down the creative mind and resulted in negative impact on performance.

The corner stone of Pink's motivation philosophy are the following.

1. Mastery
Mastery is the human instinct to get better at things. No matter if there is a reward associated or not with it. One needs to become better at the skill. For example all the open source developers have been writing tons of code just to get better at it instead of getting pennies / dollars per line of code.

2. Purpose 
Purpose derives the development of Wikipedia which has overtaken encarta as the number one online encyclopedia.  There are no monetary rewards but only purpose. The higher purpose of helping others.

3. Autonomy
Autonomy improves self-direction and helps people work in a better way. This is the Google model. Let the engineers work on any thing they want to work as soon as that is not the regular work. This led to brilliant ideas being developed. ROWE(Results only work environment) people don't have schedules they have to show progress and what they do when they do depends on themselves. The productivity and creativity goes up.

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