Why extrinsic motivation doesnt work

By Tim Topham Pedagogy. Have you ever promised one of your students a prize or award for playing a passage correctly, performing at a concert or entering a competition? If so, think again. Drive is full of detailed research into the psychology of motivation as it relates to individuals as well as organisations.

The following are a few key points about motivation that I found particularly relevant to my piano teaching. After spending some time observing the children over a couple of weeks,. Researchers asked these children simply if they wanted to draw. Researchers asked these children if they wanted to draw, but neither promised nor gave them a certificate at the end. They're just not motivated to listen to you or to engage in the meeting. What we really have to understand is that people are always motivated.

The question is not "if. It not only doesn't work, but it irritates people. Kruse: It's really about the "why" of their motivation, so how do we get to that? How can we work with how they are already motivated? Fowler: That's a great question, and there are two breakthroughs in motivation science that are really worth talking about.

One of them may seem really obvious, but then when you look at practical application, it's not, and that is this idea that it is our human nature to want to thrive, that people want to flourish. The reason that is not really common practice is if you look at the statistics on disengagement for example, and we say that a majority of people in their work are disengaged.

I think that a lot of business owners, managers, leaders, entrepreneurs think that, "Oh well. People are basically lazy. People are disengaged, unless we can give them something, or do something to make them engaged. They've got a wrong-headed approach from the very beginning. I think what we need to be able to say is, "People want to thrive. People want to flourish, and if they're not, why? Why aren't they? They will, over time, become disengaged.

Motivating people is about finding ways to help people satisfy their three psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Those three things have been written about before, but what happens is other authors always want to put their stamp on it, and I really want to honor the research that's been done by Dr. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and this entire community of self-determination research theorists and researchers.

Those are the three terms they use and they use them for a reason. Kruse: What are your views on drivers of engagement in terms of intrinsic versus extrinsic? Fowler: I can send you a boatload of research. Employee work passion is the upper end of engagement, and it's a state of being, and it's some place that people get to over time after they have experiences on a daily basis.

The other thing that's happened is that we have gotten so hung up on this concept of intrinsic motivation. What's really important is to understand that the research says there's actually six different ways of being motivated, and only one of them is purely intrinsic. In this case, adding motivation leads to procrastination because it creates more pressure.

Take note parents and managers: if you push someone to do something like this, you can actually undermine his productivity in the long term. Say you entered an academic competition to win an award. Unfortunately, extrinsic motivation can also lead to the erosion of enjoyment in tasks that were previously intrinsically pleasing.

For instance, the overjustification effect shows that giving excessive external rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation. So, if we rely on external rewards to motivate ourselves or others to do a task we could be permanently reducing their intrinsic enjoyment of that task! The main ingredient of intrinsic motivation is autonomy - being able to take full responsibility for our own lives. Sometimes we say, that there are two most important days in our lives.

The day we were born and the day that we found why. That's the moment when we take full charge of our future and our life's destiny.