Daniel Pink explains why carrots-and-sticks motivation fails for modern work. Extrinsic rewards work for routine tasks, but 21st-century jobs need intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Most business systems still run on outdated 20th-century assumptions.
I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what's alarming here is that our business operating system— think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources— it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic reward and punishment approach doesn't work and often does harm.
