Challenging Behaviorist Dogma: Myths About Money and Motivation

Response The conventional wisdom among compensation specialists is to throw money and other rewards at employees in order to motivate them and make them work harder. But numerous studies have shown that, in the workplace, money ranks far behind such factors as challenging work or interesting people to work with. Furthermore, there are no controlled scientific studies that have found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any monetary or other reward system. In fact, the more rewards are used to "motivate" people, the more people lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the rewards. Money itself is not the problem, but using money to get people to jump through hoops, is. And a preoccupation with money can distract the compensation specialist from attending to what's really important in moving an organization forward-meeting employees' needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy.