The science of motivating staff

Do you offer monetary incentives to motivate staff?  Think again.

Dan Pink believes traditional reward practice like increasing pay aren’t always effective in motivating and improving staff performance. He argues that there is a huge mismatch between the science behind motivating people and what companies practice. To illustrate his point Dan quoted two riveting studies:

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance” ( Federal Reserve of Boston, Paper No. 05-11)

“We find that financial incentives….. can result in a negative impact on overall performance” (Dr Bernd Irlenbusch, London School of Economics)

Incidentally, Dan used Atlassian to illustrate the value of intrinsic rewards. Dan’s talk will challenge how you view incentives and staff motivation.