Carrots and Sticks Don't Work

McGraw-Hill

Contents

Chapter One

"The only carrots that interest me are the number of carats in a diamond."

—Mae West

"Carrots and sticks" refers to using rewards and punishment to motivate others. This system is based on the principles of operant conditioning. Similarly, there is the expression "carrot-on-a-stick," which conjures up the image of a carrot tied to a stick held just beyond the reach of a donkey to encourage the animal to go faster. In organizations, "carrots" refer to rewards or incentives dangled in front of employees to motivate them to strive toward some goal. These incentives range from coffee mugs to lucrative financial bonuses and everything in between. The obvious assumption is that employees are actually motivated by the particular carrot being offered.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning refers to specific behavioral strategies developed by B. F. Skinner to change behavior. Terms associated with Skinner's approach, such as positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment, are often bantered about among human resources managers, business leaders, and consultants as they seek to motivate employees. Unfortunately, these terms have become widely misunderstood and misused.

Reinforcement—both positive and negative—refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of a behavior occurring in the future. Common forms of positive reinforcement include praise, privileges, money, and various rewards. Negative reinforcement refers to the removal of an aversive stimulus. For example, when a mother picks up a crying baby and the baby stops crying, the mother is negatively reinforced and thus more likely to pick up the baby when it cries in the future. Although it is possible to use negative reinforcement as a motivational strategy in the workplace, it is highly uncommon.

Punishment refers to adverse consequences that decrease the likelihood of the behavior occurring again in the future. Common forms of punishment include ignoring, penalties, fines, and taking away privileges. In the workplace, suspending an employee without pay is an example of using punishment to change behavior.

Here's the important part: in order for a consequence to be considered reinforcing or punishing, it must impact the probability of the behavior occurring again. If the consequence does not increase or decrease the likelihood of the behavior, then it does not meet the criteria as reinforcement or punishment.

This distinction is important because it suggests that whether a consequence is reinforcing or punishing depends on the individual and may differ further depending on the situation and source of the consequence (i.e., the person delivering it). For example, if your boss yells at you for being late to work and you start coming in on time, then the boss's yelling served as a form of punishment because it impacted your behavior. In contrast, if your wife yells at you for coming home late from work and your behavior does not change, then her yelling is not punishment— it is nagging.

It would be highly inaccurate and irresponsible of me to suggest that the principles of operant conditioning are ineffective. Thousands of empirical studies have demonstrated the power of operant conditioning to motivate animals, children, and adults to engage in specific behaviors in an effort to attain rewards. While in graduate school, I spent several years learning, researching, applying, and teaching these principles to help change the behavior of children diagnosed with conduct disorder. In fact, whether you realize it or not, we all use reinforcement and punishment every day in our personal lives. Whether you are feeding your cat because she is meowing for food, thanking your child for making his bed, or withholding affection from your significant other because he forgot your anniversary, you are using the techniques of operant conditioning to shape the behavior of those around you—as your behavior is being shaped in kind. I have always been frustrated by parents and supervisors who resist learning about the principles of behavior modification because they do not want to "manipulate" their children or employees. You use these techniques every day; wouldn't it be nice to know what you're doing?

There is nothing wrong with the principles of operant conditioning. It is just that they don't work in the context of a business environment where you need people to use their minds. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about "fixing" traditional reward and recognition programs because the problem isn't with these programs at all; the problem is the fundamental, underlying assumption that to maximize the productivity of our employees we need to motivate them.

We have been led to believe that the same principles that get a mouse or pigeon to "work hard" are the ones that we should use to make human beings more productive. Here's the news-flash: human beings performing work in organizations are actually different from mice running in mazes and pressing bars for food pellets. People are complex beings filled with thoughts, feelings, attitudes, personalities, skills, experiences, and goals whose work is typically complex and requires higher-order cognitive skills including problem solving and decision making. Moreover, we work with other complex human beings in complex organizations. Although it may feel like it at times, we are not hamsters running on a wheel.

A Brief History of Human Motivation

For nearly all of human history, people have been motivated using "sticks," not "carrots." Why? Before the Industrial Revolution, there were few employees; most work that wasn't accomplished by the self-employed was done by slaves, criminals, and military personnel, and those who did not work hard were physically punished or killed, which are quite effective motivational techniques. It was not until the Industrial Revolution and the building of factories that there was a need to employ large numbers of free citizens. Thus, the roots of today's workforce are less than two hundred years old. (Pharaohs did not have to worry about the principles of operant conditioning!) In fact, it has been in only the past one hundred years that researchers, scientists, and business leaders have systematically approached the study of employee motivation and productivity. Let's take a look at some of the most important and influential work during this time.

Frederick Taylor—Father of Scientific Management

As factories and assembly lines grew, a new discipline emerged: scientific management. Often considered the father of this movement, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. Taylor had worked for Bethlehem Steel and was interested in maximizing productivity. He undertook careful study of the tools, processes, and methods used in the manufacturing process. Coupled with the pioneering work of psychologists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, time and motion studies became, and still are, a cornerstone of efficient manufacturing processes. Obvious but important, the work involved entirely manual labor and almost no thinking. In fact, referring to his studies with steel workers, Taylor wrote:

This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be. Yet it will be shown that the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

Thus, the prevailing thinking was that thinking was not required. The focus was strictly on behavior and how to maximize an individual's output.

The Hawthorne Studies

Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo was also concerned with the study and measurement of processes and environmental variables to increase employee productivity. Mayo and his colleagues worked with female employees who assembled telephone relays at Western Electric Hawthorne Works near Chicago from 1927 to 1932. During this time the researchers manipulated various factors such as light levels, work schedules, rest breaks, and refreshments. The women baffled the researchers by continuing to increase their productivity even under extremely unfavorable conditions, for example, very low levels of light. Mayo and his colleagues finally concluded that it was the attention given to these employees by the researchers that resulted in their increased performance; the finding became known as the Hawthorne Effect. Although there has been considerable controversy over this research and the conclusions drawn at the time, there is no question that it shed light on the importance of psychological factors affecting employee motivation and productivity, including worker autonomy, consulting with employees about their work, and paying attention to social factors in the workplace, including group cohesiveness and relations between supervisors and employees. If Taylor took away the "human" from the study of employee motivation and productivity, Mayo gave it back.

Skinner's Approach

The science of behavior was greatly furthered and forever changed by B. F. Skinner and his principles of operant conditioning introduced in The Behavior of Organisms (1938). Skinner used reinforcement and punishment techniques to motivate the behavior of lab animals such as mice and pigeons. These same principles and techniques proved to be highly effective in motivating human behavior and dovetailed perfectly with the field of scientific management and its focus on behavior. There appeared to be no need to consider people's thoughts or feelings to explain behavior. Thus, in what was becoming a tug-of-war of competing approaches to the study of motivation, Skinner succeeded in taking the "human" back out.

Henry Murray's Exploration in Personality

However, also published in 1938 and in stark contrast to Skinner, Henry Murray's book, Explorations in Personality, suggested that humans are motivated by factors such as their relationships to others and their level of professional achievement. Murray was the first psychologist to posit a theory of motivation based on such higher-order needs and would strongly influence David McClelland's Theory of Needs model. Murray recognized the importance of thoughts, feelings, and emotions as relevant to the study of human motivation. The tug-of-war continued.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

In 1943, Abraham Maslow challenged Skinner's behaviorism model and suggested that a model of human motivation should be centered on people and not animals. Known as the father of humanistic psychology, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs model explained human motivation based on meeting needs at different levels. At the lowest level were physiological needs such as food and water. At the second level were needs around safety and security. At level three, Maslow suggested that we seek to fulfill a sense of belonging and affiliation such as having friends and family and being part of a work group. Next, he hypothesized that we were driven by esteem issues such as achievement and respect. Finally, at level five, Maslow theorized that we seek personal growth and fulfillment.

Maslow's work has stood the test of time. In fact, his model readily predicts and explains human behavior during difficult economic times.

As people become more concerned about keeping their job, they are naturally going to be less focused on teamwork. Why? Because in teamwork one risks making others look good and not getting full credit for one's accomplishments. People are less likely to share information, cooperate, or display discretionary effort unless doing so directly increases their perceived value to the organization. Breakdown in teamwork is well explained by Maslow's model. If you want people to function more cohesively as a team, they must feel secure in their jobs.

Since the 1950s there have been a number of significant developments in the field of human motivation and a plethora of theories to explain and impact human behavior in the work-place, including Albert Bandura's Self-Efficacy Theory, Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, Victor Vroom's Expectancy Theory, Frederick Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory, Martin Fish-bein's Expectancy-Value Theory, Edwin Locke's Goal-Setting Theory, and John Adams's Equity Theory. Each of these has contributed significantly to our understanding of employee motivation and productivity in the workplace. Collectively, this body of research provides overwhelming evidence that employees are motivated by their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and that what was effective at motivating Skinner's lab animals to work for food pellets is too simplistic to fully explain the complexities of human motivation. Skinner lost the empirical tug-of-war. Given all this, it is difficult to understand why our primary approach to motivating employees continues to be reward and recognition programs based on the principles of operant conditioning. It just doesn't make sense.

Motivation in the Workplace Today

The workplace and its employees are very different today than they were prior to the second half of the twentieth century. One of the biggest changes is employees' expectations and their relationship to their work. Managers, leaders, and human resources professionals must be willing to give up traditional beliefs about the role of motivation and factors that affect employee motivation if they are to deal effectively with today's workforce.

Do Your Employees Enjoy Their Jobs?

The question of whether a person enjoyed his or her work is a recent and primarily Western phenomenon. Certainly through the 1950s, work served the primary purpose of putting food on the table and a roof over one's head. While people undoubtedly developed friendships at work and may even have enjoyed their work depending on their profession and position, such issues were not viewed as particularly relevant to making a living. Over the past few decades, employees have placed more and more importance on deriving a certain level of satisfaction and meaning from their work. This is particularly true once employees reach a certain monetary threshold that comfortably provides for their quality of life. Today's leaders who wish to maximize the productivity of their employees must fully understand and embrace the notion that employees work for more than just money; they work to feel good about themselves.

Show Me the Money!

Money can motivate individual performance; however, the impact on performance is typically short-lived. Money falls under what Frederick Herzberg called a Hygiene factor, in other words, a factor that has more to do with decreasing motivation than increasing it. Money matters a lot under two conditions. First, it matters at the very low end of the pay scale where an additional dollar an hour can make a significant difference to an individual. Second, it matters when people find out that they are being undercompensated relative to a colleague or market value; this situation violates Equity Theory. A classic example occurs when a new employee is hired at a higher salary than an existing employee doing the same job. Under these conditions, the existing employee, who may have been perfectly satisfied with his pay, naturally becomes upset and feels unappreciated. Typically, the employee will quit, demand more money, or perform markedly worse. If an organization is going to hire a new employee with similar skills and education to an existing employee at a higher pay rate, my suggestion is to give an "equity raise" to your existing employee before the new employee comes aboard.

But I Know Motivation Works!

If we are talking about changing behavior, motivation techniques can be very helpful in raising a person's level of readiness to change and in getting him or her to begin engaging in desired behaviors. However, motivation is rarely enough to sustain behavior change over time. In the words of Jim Ryun, "Motivation is what gets you started; habits are what keep you going." I've been a group fitness instructor for almost a decade, have designed an organizational health and wellness program, have taught classes on behavior modification, and have done individual counseling with people to help them break poor habits and create healthy ones. I can tell you with certainty that nearly everyone who begins a diet or exercise program does so with great motivation, but if that initial inspiration is not supplemented with factors such as social support, education, and a sound exercise and nutrition program, most people will find themselves back where they started in just a few weeks. Similarly, many programs that try to motivate employees begin with a bang and fizzle out quickly. Behaviors that change quickly also change back quickly.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Carrots and Sticks Don't Workby Paul L. Marciano Copyright © 2010 by Paul L. Marciano. Excerpted by permission of McGraw-Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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