Extrinsic Vs Intrinsic Motivation at Work

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, I was playing in the basement of our house, and I found a duffle bag stuffed under a pile of other random stuff. The bag was full of plaques, trophies, and different awards that all had my dad’s name on them. They were all awards that my dad had won at some point in his job. Being the trophy-obsessed millennial that I was, I ran upstairs with the bag and asked him, “Dad, these are awesome. These are really cool plaques and awards. How come these are all packed away in the basement?”

He responded plainly “They’re not important anymore. So, I don’t display them.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my dad’s rejection of the duffle bag was basically the first rejection I had ever seen of extrinsic motivators at work. Companies around the world use plaques, trophies, or bonuses to try to get more out of their employees. They try to motivate them to work harder through what amounts to basic bribery. And when you ask executives about the strategy behind those compensation plans or performance contests, you realize that there is still not a lot of clarity around how or when to use extrinsic motivators to improve performance, and when leveraging intrinsic motivation would work better.

In this article, we’re going to provide some of that clarity. We’ll review what extrinsic…