Be Smart When You Reward

There are some things in life that are black and white. Either right or wrong. Good or bad. Helpful or not. Achieving its objective or not. And then there are situations where it depends. According to Daniel Pink, author of Drive. The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, using extrinsic rewards as motivation is one of those things. He's generally not a big fan of the so-called "carrots and sticks" approach: rewarding for good and punishing for bad behavior in order to get the behavior you want. There are just too many things that can go wrong, leading him to sum it up in his seven reasons why carrots and sticks usually fail*:

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.

What all this doesn't mean is that they always fail. In other words, it depends. Pink dedicates one chapter of his book to explaining when extrinsic rewards actually make sense and how to use them. Instead of giving a summary of said chapter, I would like you to take a look at the chart below, which sums it up very nicely. And as always, for further explanations, read the book :-)

Click on the image below to see a larger version of the flowchart.

* For a closer look at some of these reasons, check out my earlier posts on the subject.