Floor Tape Store

Monday, July 14, 2014

Carrots and Sticks Don’t Motivate in a Thinking Environment


Motivation is a core factor for a successful business and there have been many studies around it, yet there is no definitive answer or a one size fits all solution to motivation and employee engagement. The several elements of motivation differ from person to person as well as circumstances.

A well known motivational concept is the “Carrot and Stick” approach. This analogy is about using rewards and penalties in order to obtain desired results. It refers to the old story that in order to get a donkey to move forward and pull the cart you would dangle a carrot in front of him or hit him with a stick from behind. The result is the same; the horse moves forward.

So the stick represents fear and punishment. It may produce immediate results that derive from prompt compliance. It is only useful in the short term though, as over time increasing levels of punishment would be necessary to obtain the same results and this can backfire in the form of mutiny and sabotage.

The carrot is then an incentive, which can work very well as long as the individual finds the incentive appealing. In this case, the donkey would have to like carrots, be hungry and/or have a manageable and movable load in order for the carrot to work. This is very important as the incentive must be perceived to be attractive enough.

Reward and punishment are significant motivators only if the reward is large enough or the punishment sufficiently severe. For example, management holds out a carrot, offering a week’s paid vacation to the person who has the highest production numbers. Employees will work hard to reach that target (if the vacation is really what they want), but once the contest is over, they will revert back to their previous level of effort. Or, management wields a stick, threatening some kind of punishment if employees don’t do their jobs. In those cases, people will do just enough to “stay under the radar” and avoid getting into trouble. While some carrots and sticks may work in crisis situations or as a stop-gap remedy, what they mostly do is promote nearsighted thinking, mistrust, cynicism, and a diminished capacity to innovate and create.

The carrot-and-stick approach worked well for typical tasks of the early 20th century – routine, unchallenging and highly controlled. For these tasks, where the process is straightforward and lateral thinking is not required, rewards can provide a small motivational boost without any harmful side effects.

But jobs in the 21st century have changed dramatically. They have become more complex, more interesting and more self-directed, and this is where the carrot-and-stick approach has become unstuck.

The carrot and stick approach to motivation doesn’t work, especially in work that is complex, requires creativity or involves problem solving. These traditional short-term motivators actually reduce creativity, and foster very short-term thinking at the expense of long-term results. They extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, crowd out good behavior, encourage cheating, shortcuts and unethical behavior, become addictive and foster short-term thinking.


Modern management techniques tell us to motivate by the carrot and stick but the carrot and stick method doesn’t work unless it’s a simple task with a simple outcome. The more complex a task the less successful the carrot and stick method becomes. Today’s problems are more complex and have unknown solutions. Rewards will narrow our focus and limit our possibilities and aren’t effective with today’s problems we see.


Subscribe to my feed Subscribe via Email LinkedIn Group Facebook Page @TimALeanJourney YouTube Channel SlideShare

4 comments:

  1. So, what is the appropriate motivator for a complex task ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you’re looking for ways to create an environment where people are driven to do their best work, you’ll need to think beyond carrots and sticks. It’s a bit trickier, perhaps a little messier, but if you want to create a thriving organization, you’ll need to consider motivation from the inside out.

      In my experience there are three things you need to learn about motivation:
      First, you can’t motivate anybody to do anything they don’t want to do. Motivation is an internal thing, not an external thing.
      The second thing is that all people are motivated. The person that stays in bed in the morning rather than getting up and going to work is more motivated to stay in bed than to work. They might be negatively motivated, but they are nonetheless motivated.
      The third thing is that people do things for their reasons and not for yours. The trick is to find out what their reasons are.

      Motivation comes from within. Individuals have the capacity to motivate themselves...or demotivate themselves. Leaders can help them see the way by creating and sustaining the kinds of conditions that help them bring their best selves to work every day. Respect, proactive and honest communications, capable and engaged leadership – these are the ingredients that add up to an engaged, energized workplace.

      Delete
    2. Hello Tim,
      So it seems that we need both type of approach to carry on business for some routine job carrot and stick job and for another jobs required creativity or innovation we need to find ways to get people self motivated to provide some ingredient which might be slightly lacking as it seems difficult to provide a totally absent ingredient for self motivation.

      Delete
  2. Hi Tim

    I fully agree that the carrot stick doesn't only not work it in fact works against what would be good for an organization. Reality is that the carrot and stick though in theory was used for donkeys it never really worked well with them because unlike a horse they are in fact rather intelligent, and will not do anything they feel would be hazardous for their wealth, so thus it only worked when they would have done something anyway.

    Today we see the carrot and stick being used constantly at the executive level of many companies, and thus these companies are poorly run and cycle through ups and downs faster than most yoyos do. Yet at the same time we see other companies with long track records of success and steady growth that in reality avoid it and their executives though paid less seem to manage to do a better job. Thus the proof is in the result there has to be a better motivator.

    Today's business stick only works on people to lazy or useless ones. Any truly worth while employees are only motivated by the stick to start looking for a new job, hopefully with a better employer. In fact I have seen a lot of people lately actually taking lower paid jobs with better employers simply because the headache of working for bad employers just is not worth it.

    Likewise today's short-term bonus only attract the type of people who know some trick to get short-term results, and only hang around long enough to grab the cash before they run off to their next willing victim.

    There are lots of better motivators, but I will leave them for another day.

    ReplyDelete