On Mon, 28 Jul 1997, James Bullock wrote:
> In fact, the research indicates that for some kinds of tasks for sure (and
> possibly for most) that "extrinsic" motivation decreases performance.
IIRC, the more complex the task, the greater the increase (and, of course,
the more complex the task, the less likely it is that the person doing it
can be replaced with a machine, or, to put it another way, the better
extrinisic motivation works at increasing people's performance on a task,
the more potential gains there are in automating the task).
> We seem to have the informational aspect of feedback, and the reward
> aspect all tangled up. It is one thing to provide information:
>
> - What is expected/required
> - What performance standards are
> - What current performance is
>
> It is another thing altogether to coerce behavior. This brings to mind a
> number of tangents:
When feedback is tied to reward systems, it almost automatically becomes
distorted, because telling someone that their current performance is near
what is expected/required suddenly requires spending more money than
telling them that their current performance is far from what is
expected/required. An evaluator who honestly tells people that they're
doing well is an evaluator who's racking up lots of line-item expenses on
the company's balance sheet.
> It seems that in the F. Taylor model (from his book _Scientific
> Management_) the whole idea is to build intelligence, adaptivity, and
> performance into the system, not allow it in the individuals. So what of
> "flow" under these circumstances?
It's important to remember that at the time Taylor came up with his
theories, craft associations held rather rigid monopolies on the exercise
of various workplace skills. Part of Taylor's goal in making jobs
essentially interchangeable and out of the control of the individual
workers was to break these strangleholds. These monopolies are long gone,
but all too many organizations are still trying to fight them.
> 2) Job Design - I wonder why it is that people who are demonstrably
> competent at choosing their hobbies, their homes, their mates, raising
> children, etc. must be so crudely motivated into business-valuable
> behavior? In large part it's (IMHO) due to the Dilbert-ization of modern
> organizational life. The diefication of stupidity. The worship of form
> over content. The gamesmanship.
IMHO, part of the problem is that heavily top-down, authoritarian
organizations, by their very nature, select their leadership from people
who are a) narcissistic and b) distrustful just this side of paranoid.
This is usually their ruin, but it can take a long time for the ruin to
occur.
Another part of the problem is the ideology of the limited good, which
leads its adherents to believe that all good must be balanced out by bad,
that anything pleasant must be balanced out by something unpleasant (and
therefore that if someone enjoys his work, he must be somehow stealing
enjoyment from someone who deserves it more), etc. Very few people
consciously believe that they subscribe to such a view--most of them would
describe such a view as BS--but many people *act* as if these beliefs were
true.
--Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>