Understanding intrinsic motivation through Drive by Daniel Pink
Book-Review, Workplace Innovation November 9th, 2011Daniel Pink gives an interesting take on motivation theories in his book “Drive:The surprising truth of what motivates us”.
The book has two parts of which the first part examines the problems with the current “carrot and stick” motivation theories used for rewards in businesses. He calls these theories as “Motivation 2.0” which worked for the Industrial Age. He gives several reasons and talks about a research where it is clearly proved that for tasks which require the use of the left brain, we cannot simply use the carrot and stick motivation techniques where “pay more do more” will not be sufficient.
Hence he introduces the theory of intrinsic motivation. He says that just extrinsic motivation is not enough but a person should be intrinsically motivated when he doing a task.For this, in the second part talks about the three elements which are at the core of using intrinsic motivation namely
1) Autonomy: People should be given freedom to choose their task, timelines,team and technique at their workplace.
2) Mastery: Using Goldilocks tasks which are just right so as to guide a person to master a task which is given to him/her.
3) Purpose: Giving the employees a sense of purpose which is bigger than themselves will often be an important of motivating the employees to do the job.
He calls the above model as “Motivation 3.0” which is more relevant to the Information Age. The employees of todays technology industries are information workers who need to be creative and hence we cannot have the same “Motivation 2.0” tools in this case.
The example which I liked the most is the power of open source software. We can see all the above mentioned factors are work in the open source field. The people are not motivated by extrinsic factors.However, they have autonomy in what they are doing. The tasks which are done by the open source community are voluntary in nature and so they come with real autonomy where the person can choose all the mentioned attributes namely the task itself, timelines, team and the technique.They are doing it in order to gain mastery over an open source technology/platform. They want to get better at the software component that they are building. They also have a sense of purpose in that they are contributing to the society at large and will potentially be used by a large user base.