External Rewards & Punishments Maybe Not so Effective?
Posted in opinion on July 29th, 2008 by adminAn article in the Washington Post describes some suprising effects of offering external rewards and punishments to people already performing tasks because they derive intrinsic value from them. It seems that science backs up the idea that if you love to do something and someone offers you an external reward or punishment for it, you will begin to loose your intrinisc interest in the activity.
This is an interesting observation. It would be very difficult to draw a broad conclusion from it , however. There are so many other factors involved when it comes to human motivation that making sense out of all of these studies is a real challenge.
I suppose the only real, solid principle out of all of this is that humans perform better when they find intrinsic value in something. This is common sense (or at least ought to be). Any good military leader will tell you that the soldiers don’t do what they do for you, they do it because they see value in it. There is definitlely something in a good leader that inspires and causes the followers to exceed even their own expectations. However, the real drive comes from within the individual follower and a good leader knows that. A good leaders knows how to inspire his people to get what they already want. That’s why they follow him.

