The Psychology of Motivation: Build Purpose, Respect Contributions, Give Credit | Dan Ariely

source: Big Think    2016年12月11日
We shouldn’t have to be told that people’s hearts and souls are not piñatas, and yet here we are. Duke psychology professor and behavioral economist Dan Ariely says when it comes to increasing motivation, there’s a precursor lesson many managers, teachers and parents miss: stop crushing spirits. Ariely's latest book is "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations" (https://goo.gl/SkXk2p).
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Transcript - So the first lesson is don’t kill motivation. You know businesses are often not about just increasing it, it is by stop decreasing it. I’ll tell you a story I gave a talk at a company in Seattle a few years ago. It’s a big software company and I was giving a talk and I was in this room with 200 really depressed engineers talking to them. It turns out they were working on whatever the next version of the – they were working on something really important and big for that company and the week before I showed up the CEO of the company came to them and canceled the project. And they were incredibly devastated. This was a group that worked for two years on something that they felt would be the next great thing for that company and the week before he just canceled it. And they did not show up on time. They were just devastated. They were just morally devastated and by the way after that many of them just left the company. They were very good people. They were just so demoralized. And I asked them I said okay, let’s just assume the CEO had to cancel the project. Let’s assume he had to cancel for whatever reason. Let’s not question that.
What could the CEO have done not to get you to be so depressed? And they came up with all kinds of ideas. They said what if he allowed them to make a few working prototypes and distribute them within the company for a few years. Just kind of see what people do with them. They say what if he allowed them to take parts of this new technology that we’re developing and see which parts will be useful in other parts of the organization, right, have some kind of leftovers from the project. They said what if you would allow them to do a workshop for the whole company to show them the journey of the last two years. What they’ve accomplished, what they’ve learned, what they struggled with, what they figured out. And the thing about all of those suggestions, all of them would have needed some time, money and effort, right. And if the CEO thinks that those people are just like rats in a cage he said oh, I told you to go this way, you went this way. Now I want to go somewhere else. I’ll close that gate. I’ll tell you to go somewhere else. Then you don’t need to worry about motivation. But if you understand that motivation is incredibly important then you say how do we get these people who have invested a lot I this and how we don’t just crush their spirits. But what he did was to crush their spirits. So lesson number one is stop crushing people’s spirit. And, you know, it might seem like a ridiculous obvious thing to do but if you look at lots of companies you’ll see lots of places where not because people intend to do harm but just because we don’t truly appreciate where meaning comes to life. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/Usw8gm.