People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw, playwright
Traditional management practices have come out of the industrial revolution and are based on an assembly line model. People are effectively treated as cogs in the machine, and motivated with a carrot and stick approach.
Historically, Economics 101 taught us that more money was the ultimate motivator. If you wanted people to work harder, then you should pay them more. However some amazing research over the last decade has looked at what motivates us, and has disproved this theory. For anything more than mechanical, repetitive work, after a certain point money actually acts as a disincentive. You need to pay people enough to take the issue of payment off the table, because naturally people will be disgruntled and leave if they are getting paid less than their market worth. Beyond that, however, the science shows us that money doesn’t act as a motivator.
American journalist and speechwriter Daniel H. Pink writes in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, that thinking money is the number one motivator is a mistake: ‘The secret to high performance and satisfaction — at work, at school, and at home — is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create ...
