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(no subject)
A ten-minute piece on Motivation, by Dan Pink, author of Drive (with a nod to Tobias Buckell, who just posted about this).
I find I'm unsurprised by these findings. This is what was found when Wikipedia studied why people participate in it, and why we identified the fact that having your work go away there with no notification to you is an active disincentive for people to keep doing it. People want to feel like their work has purpose, and that their mastery is recognizable, if not recognized. Having an authoritarian structure that stifles creativity there has hurt the project, because people want to be creative as they build mastery and serve a purpose. If good work is casually destroyed because someone thought it was off-topic or was insufficiently encyclopedic for wikipedia, people don't stick around to do more of it.
In the middle there, he talks about how the key point with paying people is that you need to pay them enough to take the question of money off the table. Beyond that, paying people more leads to worse performance.
How much do you think you would need to get paid to take the question of money off the table?
I find I'm unsurprised by these findings. This is what was found when Wikipedia studied why people participate in it, and why we identified the fact that having your work go away there with no notification to you is an active disincentive for people to keep doing it. People want to feel like their work has purpose, and that their mastery is recognizable, if not recognized. Having an authoritarian structure that stifles creativity there has hurt the project, because people want to be creative as they build mastery and serve a purpose. If good work is casually destroyed because someone thought it was off-topic or was insufficiently encyclopedic for wikipedia, people don't stick around to do more of it.
In the middle there, he talks about how the key point with paying people is that you need to pay them enough to take the question of money off the table. Beyond that, paying people more leads to worse performance.
How much do you think you would need to get paid to take the question of money off the table?
no subject
I've read some of the studies that (I think) the presentation was referring to, however, and my take on them was not that higher pay leads to worse performance, but rather that the possibility of higher pay leads to worse performance. It's the anticipation of large sums of money and the uncertainty about whether you'll get it that is distracting and leads to lower performance. A steady paycheck, no matter how high, is neither an incentive for greater work nor a distraction from your current work. It's just something that shows up at the end of the pay period, not something that you either daydream or worry about. IMHO and in my personal experience.
no subject
Nowadays there's no bonus on the table, and I do find I feel liberated as a result. Poorer but liberated.
But yeah, it's the work I do outside work outside work that gives me the autonomy and other stuff.