INTRODUCTION
Stop Beating Your People with Carrots
A funny thing happened on the way to understanding human motivation. Psychologists decided to study animals. For example, you can watch Harvard psychology professor B. F. Skinner on YouTube showing how he motivates a conditioned pigeon to do a 360-degree turn by rewarding its behavior with pellets. It is fascinating to watch as he rewards the bird for doing what he wants it to do—he can get it to do almost anything. Behaviorists reasoned that this method could motivate people in the workplace the same way: reward people for doing what you want them to do, and you can get them to do almost anything. And guess what? It worked—or seemed to. I call it the Pecking Pigeon Paradigm.
Using metaphorical ...
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