Can Motivation Be Increased?

In the modern economy, motivation is a tricky thing. A hundred years ago, when people like Frederick Taylor were pioneering scientific management, motivation was pretty easy. The idea was that you could switch people from an hourly rate to a piece rate system to do a set of repetitive tasks and that would incentivize them to do the tasks faster. It was a rudimentary idea, but in some organizations it’s still the philosophy behind how pay-especially incentive pay-is set. And there is actually a decent amount of research that incentives like that can work to increase motivation when there is a really clear understanding of exactly what tasks must be done to earn the reward. But in a knowledge work or creative work economy, those easy-to-understand, repetitive tasks are becoming more and more rare.

Fortunately, there’s another option to increase motivation.

The research that began to uncover that option was conducted by two men, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. Deci and Ryan pioneered was would come to be known as Self-Determination Theory. Self-Determination Theory essentially argued that people are motivated when they can determine for themselves what to work on and how to work on it. In other words, Deci and Ryan and many other pioneers in this field of research, asserted that incentives could actually decrease motivation because incentives take away a sense of power to…