Motivation has become a hot topic in recent years. Fueled by public furor over the size of bonuses after the banking crisis, the idea that financial rewards do not work and can encourage the wrong sorts of behaviors has become a popular mantra. Instead, we are told, the secret is to build employees’ inner commitment. And some solid research has been brought forward showing this kind inner motivation can, indeed, be more powerful than external rewards in driving performance. Yet as so often happens, we have leapt a bit too quickly on this bandwagon. The debate has become confused and the conclusions oversimplified. Because while intrinsic motivation can be a great source of motivation, it is often just not enough.
The inner commitment leaders now are routinely urged to build in their people is what psychologists call intrinsic motivation. It is the desire to act in a certain way purely because we find it fulfilling, rather than because of external rewards, such as bonuses. And in many situations and cases, it has been shown to be a more powerful motivator of performance than external rewards. Hence the repeated call for leaders to provide meaning and purpose for people. But here is where the debate has become confused, because it mostly has focused on how to motivate people to perform well in their job. What has been far less looked at is how to help people to develop and change behaviour. And when we explore this, we find a very different picture.
Permeating every society and every culture, there is a fundamental idea about how to change behavior. It is called the law of effect (Thorndike, E.L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 2(4), i-109.). It is the belief that if you reward certain behaviors, you will get more of them, whereas if you punish them, you will get less of them. If you want proof, just ask any parent or dog owner and they will tell you: When it comes to encouraging behaviors, sweets and treats work. Indeed, we once worked with a quiet and introverted senior leader whose trick to make himself speak up in meetings was to place a chocolate bar in front of him on the meeting table, and only eat it once he had spoken. Academics back this approach, too. Cash rewards have been shown to increase the success of behavior change initiatives such as stopping smoking, increasing exercise, and changing dietary behaviors (Gneezy, U., Meier, S., & Ray-Biel, P. (2011). When and Why Incentives (Don’t) Work to Modify Behavior. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(4), 191-210.).
As anyone who has ever made a New Year’s resolution in earnest will tell you, forming new habits is hard, and people often need all the encouragement and incentives they can get. That’s why less than 20 percent ultimately succeed in their New Year’s resolution, despite having strong intrinsic motivation to see those resolutions through. For all the talk of the power of intrinsic motivation, it often needs a little help.
What rewards can offer, then, is a type of external scaffolding or support for behavior change—something managers and business can use to help see change over the line. The question is how best to use them. Fortunately, there are some basic rules to help guide us:
Rule 1: Support intrinsic motivation. One clear research finding is that if you offer rewards to someone who already is intrinsically motivated to do something, then the rewards can end up lowering their motivation to do it. But placed in support of intrinsic motivators, rewards can help. They are, for example, particularly effective in the early stages of trying to help someone change behavior, when they are still trying to establish a new behavior as a habit. The case of the chocolate bar above is a classic example of this.
Rule 2: Tailor, tailor, tailor. Every person and situation is different, so make sure to tailor the reward to the individual. Chocolate may work for some, public praise for others. And while people who are beginning to learn something, have been shown to respond better to praise and reward, more experienced people or those close to achieving goals have been shown to respond better to constructive criticism.
Rule 3: Praise first, money last. We tend to think of rewards as tangible things such as money and prizes. Yet when thinking about which rewards to give, we are better off starting with the intangibles: praise and recognition. They are free to give and can be just as powerful as financial rewards (Mueller, C.M., & Dweck, C.S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33-52.). As a rule, money should be a last resort.
Rule 4: Get the timing right. Providing a reward or punishment immediately after a behavior occurs is far more effective than doing so some time later.
These are just the basics, of course, as there is a whole science to using rewards. But the point I want to make here is just that rewards can help and, indeed, are often essential in helping people to change behavior. There is something else, too. Rewards and incentives are just one type of external support. But there are others. Having the right opportunities to practice, being linked in with others and social support, and even simple information about the pros and cons of different behaviors all have been shown to be able to be support behavior change. And then there are the mechanics of how to form habits and the various techniques that can be used to bolster people’s willpower and persistence.
When we think about performance or behavior change, we tend to just think about the individual—and in recent years about what his or her intrinsic motivators are, in particular. But it’s time to broaden these horizons, to look beyond the individual, and think about the external, contextual factors that can help. Changing behavior is tough, and good intentions and solid intrinsic motivation are too often not enough. Let’s give them a helping hand.
Nik Kinley is a director for global leadership development and assessment consultancy YSC. Prior to YSC, Kinley was head of Learning for Barclays GRBF; prior to that, he was the global head of Assessment for the BP Group. He has specialized in the fields of behavior change and assessment for nearly 25 years, and in this time has worked with CEOs, life-sentence prisoners, and children. His latest book, “Changing Employee Behaviour: A Practical Guide for Managers,” was published in March 2015. For more information, visit changingemployeebehavior.com.
