Drive, Daniel H. Pink

Dan Pink’s bestseller Drive is as inspiring as it it is revealing. The book clearly demonstrates how extrinsic motivation of employees does not work the way most people still expect it works. It also demonstrates the power of intrinsic motivation.

What is perhaps most revealing about the book is that all the information has been available for companies for decades already, backed up by science. But for some reason companies and management have a hard time catching up with science. The idea that you need to reward people to get good results still prevails in most organizations.

After busting the myths on extrinsic motivation Pink reveals three elements of intrinsic motivation that work much better: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The risks of extrinsic motivation

Pink defines seven risks of the traditional carrots and sticks way of motivating employees:

• Rewards can have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation. Many people do thing out of intrinsic motivation, you don’t need to tell them to do it. But when you reward them for it their motivation actually goes down.
• Same thing for performance. Rewards lead to poorer performance as soon as the task involves rudimentary cognitive skills.
• Monetary incentives can lead to less creativity because the incentive clouds the focus and thinking process needed for creativity.
• Most people display good behavior simply because they feel it is the right thing to do. When we start rewarding for it, it start to become an economic matter in stead of a moral one. Behavior takes a turn for the worse.
• Even more so incentives can lead to unethical behavior. We have all seen examples of this in scandals like Emron and Volkswagen. KPIs and accompanying bonuses can lead to a narrowing focus: get the result no matter how.
• Rewards can be addictive. Once you start rewarding desired behavior people will expect the reward and you are stuck with it forever.
• Finally, extrinsic motivation works best for short-term tasks. But this means it can also lead to short-term thinking, which is one of the adaptive anti-patterns we have identified.

Pink also describes some circumstances under which extrinsic motivation can work.

The elements of intrinsic motivation

The book then describes three elements of successful motivation. The first is autonomy, the desire to self-regulate. Mastery is the desire to be good at something, to master a topic or skill. Purpose refers to a higher meaning at which people can contribute.

These three elements are widely known because of the succes of the book and a video that has gone viral. What I don’t understand is why Pink choose to deviate from the three fundamental psychological needs discovered by Deci and Ryan as part of their Self Determination Theory (SDT): Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The terms mean nearly the same and much of Pink’s book is based on research of Deci and Ryan or their followers. In spite of the popularity of Pink’s terminology on www.adaptive-organizations.com we prefer to stick to the original terms and use SDT as the foundation of motivation in adaptive organizations.