Probably each of us can recall at least one morning when we had to force ourselves to get up and go to work. Or maybe compel ourselves to actually work. Motivation is a state which often has to be created and maintained, and the incentives have to be constantly revised. It happened that I had to deal with motivational issues in two different situations: as an employee and as a coordinator of an interest group.

In the first case, we are paid to do a certain job and most employers consider a decent payment is more than enough to motivate personnel and all the other issues pertaining to motivation have to be figured out solely by the employees. In the second case, the interest group I work with operates on a voluntary basis and motivation suddenly acquires a different meaning. It has nothing to do with money, but still there are thousands of highly skilled people who volunteer daily and their results can often be higher than those paid for the same tasks.

So what actually drives us to work and perform better?

According to Daniel Pink, there is a significant mismatch between business perspectives on motivation and social science findings. The typical motivation scheme within companies and organizations is rewarding top performers and in this way setting an example for the rest. So the belief is that if employers reward a certain behavior, this leads to a reinforcement of that particular behavior. Experiments show that this is valid mainly for mechanical tasks and the higher the payment, the better the work performance.

However, once some cognitive skills are required, either conceptual thinking or a creative approach, things take an interesting turn. The carrots and sticks strategy is not successful anymore and furthermore it produces the opposite results! That is: larger rewards lead to poorer performance. Isn’t that strange? This study has been replicated in both highly developed and developing countries. In such cases, people are driven more by ideals and by a sense of personal value than just money.

Research reveals that if people are paid enough money so that they do not worry about finances anymore and are treated like people and not machines, then results can be truly surprising. Daniel Pink talks about three important factors which lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose. He claims that management is good if you want compliance, but autonomy or self-direction works better if you want engagement. The freedom of undertaking small initiatives at the workplace can do magic.

How often have you had this chance and felt great about yourself, which consequently motivated you to invest more energy in your tasks? This intertwines with mastery and purpose, because we strive to improve our skills and knowledge, at the same time we want to feel useful and contribute to positive change on any social level. This explains pretty well why people volunteer. These are the qualitative outcomes that money alone cannot offer.

Thinking back to some previous jobs, this makes perfect sense and I realized that my ex-employers seldom paid attention to such things. Once, I was asked if I wanted bonuses to perform better, which helped me understand that this will not really change my motivation, because what I was doing gave me neither personal fulfillment nor professional development. And when you feel you have the potential to do much more and you have ideas but no space to implement them, then maybe changing your job is the solution.

I noticed the dynamics of my interest group generally confirm these findings. We work for free and still we are motivated to allocate time and personal resources to our project. What we do is meant to have a social impact, so each of us feels important in that regard, each of us assumed a responsibility which carries a meaning. This generates satisfaction and motivates us to explore our possibilities even more. Setting deadlines or delegating particular tasks doesn’t really work well in this case. I assume it limits the autonomy and reduces involvement and initiative. So basically, we agree upon a certain period of time when each of us chooses a task and then we are free to decide how to work on that.

Time restrictions or any other kind of unnecessary restrictions tend to inhibit lateral thinking and the person will often do the task just to be on time and will not necessarily do the best possible job. Some guidelines are of course necessary to avoid chaos, but once people learn to be more responsible, undertake commitments and respect them, then we move onto a totally different level of work. Maybe employers are just afraid of loosing control or authority over their employees, so they put them in a position in which they become afraid of being fired if they don’t comply.

We often overlook the fact that not only employees need the job, but also employers need us. I know people who went to interviews and at the end they always asked "So why would I want to work for you?" The potential employers were of course baffled. This says a lot about our inherent perception of employment as a hierarchical system. Probably not many have the courage to ask something like that, but I think this is a sound way of collaborating. Motivation should be expressed by both parties.