Dan Pink makes a very interesting proposal on how employees should be motivated. His argument basically seeks to show that the kind of jobs done in the 21st century require a new approach to answering the question on how employees are to be maximally motivated to do these jobs.
The theme of his talk is that there is a disagreement between what science advocates for in the management of business and how business management should be undertaken. The talk significantly shows that the carrot-stick approach is increasingly losing significance in today’s workplace.
The speaker starts off his argument by examining the candle problem – an experiment created in 1945 by Karl Duncker. The speaker argues that solving the candle problem requires overcoming functional fixedness. The speaker further notes that creativity is also important in solving the problem.
When the experiment was undertaken, the results showed that incentives did not help to solve problems that required cognitive performance. Actually, the results showed that giving incentives in cognitive based problems reduced productivity of workers. These results and the argument of the speaker seem illogical at first. But as he continues to offer more evidence to his argument, a lot of sense emerges out of his talk.
I find the talk convincing. Pink uses ample evidence to pass across his argument. I am in agreement with him about the dynamics of the 21st century workplace. It is true that people are becoming more interested in doing what they enjoy doing rather than doing what earns them more cash.
Pink argues that the carrot-stick approach works in environments where there is a routine schedule to be followed. He goes ahead to note that few workplaces have fixed routines to be followed. I find this to be true. This is because even in workplaces which seem to have fixed routines, there is always a room for creativity – it cannot be said that there are routine jobs per se. For instance, take the work done by a receptionist.
This work may be perceived to be of a fixed nature. But the truth is, a receptionist has plenty of room for creativity and thus can avoid doing his or her work routinely. This is possible if the ROWE (Result Oriented Workplace Environment) approach proposed by Pink is applied to this job.
Pink suggests the ROWE approach for the 21st century workplace. He argues that this approach works better than the carrot-stick approach because it gives autonomy to employees. He goes further to buttress this view by quoting few examples where the ROWE approach has led to realization of brilliant outcomes. The examples include Gmail, a product of a Google’s “20 percent autonomy hours”.
Definitely, Pink makes a powerful proposal but something that I find out of order in his talk is his insistence on incentives almost having no place in the workplace today. In as much as people are looking for autonomy in their workplace and jobs which can give them satisfaction, I believe incentives still play a significant role in increasing productivity.
A better stand would be marrying ROWE and carrot-stick approaches in a manner that would optimize productivity. It is obvious that doing away with incentives will be demoralizing to employees especially if an organization keeps on making huge profits and what the employees get in turn is their normal salaries and just the joy of doing their work.
Works Cited
Pink, Dan. “The puzzle of motivation.” TED, 2013. Web.