Can Understanding our Motivation Fix the Business World?

Have you ever taken a second to question where your daily motivation comes from?  Ever considered what makes you wake up in the morning and begin another day? I for one have. And honestly, it allowed me to consider some remarkable information and ideas about how and why we function.

The human race has three known motivations, three driving forces that get us to do everything we do every day.  The first is our motivation to live. For example, when one is thirsty, he or she is motivated to drink a glass of water.  This motivation is rather simple and seemingly self-explanatory. A species unmotivated to live will simply cease to. So, of course, we are motivated to live because if we were not, then we would not have made it this far.

Our second motivation is through rewards and punishments.  We see this in any modern, capitalist business. If one works hard, they get a raise.  If one works inefficiently, they are fired. This idea has been implemented into the majority of businesses for the last hundred years.

We also see examples of this in how our government runs.  When people follow the law, they are provided with rights, such as the ability to vote, health services, and basic freedoms.  When people break these laws, all those rights vanish and are replaced with forceful imprisonment. Fear to break the law has been a tactic used for thousands of years and has been working relatively well.

Economies and governments, around the world, use this innate response to get us to do what we are told.  It is the current primary tool within most first world countries, which is not terrible. It is a lot better than using the first motivation, I would not enjoy a world where we are starved for going above the speed limit.  This is why I do not totally hate our current system, but I also do not totally love it either.

The last of the motivations is our drive to expand the knowledge and skills of ourselves and our community.  In an experiment to test this third motivation, researchers gave dozens of chimpanzees a simple jigsaw puzzle once a day.  There was no incentive of any sort to do the puzzle, no food attached, no zookeeper pushing the chimps toward the puzzle, nothing.  Regardless, every day the chimps would work vigorously to complete the challenge. As each day passed, the chimps became experts at these simple games.  On average, they continually beat their times from the day before as the weeks went on.

These results made a firm conclusion that there must be a third motivation since neither of the first two were being fulfilled in this experiment.  They found that we are simply motivated to learn, which makes complete sense. By improving our knowledge and skills we are more equipped to handle any future situations presented to us; as well as giving us something to be passionate about.  Right now, I am writing, and you are reading, because we want to be more insightful on our motivations. We want to be knowledgeable people because the more knowledge we have, the more we can hopefully help ourselves and others around us.

Therefore, with all of this in mind, I wonder why this isn’t our motivation in society?  Why do we rely on rewards and punishment, rather than having people simply fulfill their desire to better themselves?  I believe the answer to these questions is outdated.

A separate experiment was later carried out, which can be seen as the battle of the second and third motivation.  In this experiment, participants were provided with a box filled with tacks, a candle, and matches. The participants had to find a way to keep the candle lit as it stood off the ground, only using the materials provided.  One group of participants were given the same amount of money no matter how long it took them. The other group was told that they would be paid twice as much if they performed in the top twenty-five percent. The results found that the group given no additional reward did much better than the group with a reward. 

Now, if you have not already figured it out, the way to solve this problem is to realize that the box containing the tacks can be used as well.  So, the participants had to light the candle and tack the box to the wall and then rest the candle in the box. This made the experiment difficult since the tools were not obviously presented.  When the second experiment began, the box was left out and explained as a fourth item. This time, the group with the incentive outperformed the other.

The conclusion drawn from this data is that rewards and punishments work better for simple jobs.  This makes sense, as we tend to get tunnel vision when we are pressed for time, rather than having all day to carry out an action.  The thing is, a hundred years ago, tunnel vision was okay, jobs were simpler back then. In the early 1900s, roughly five percent of jobs used cognitive thinking skills.  Now, around thirty-five percent of jobs use those skills, and it is only uphill from here.  

Being in the middle of the digital age, the human race has never needed to be as creative as we are now.  Jobs are requiring outside of the box thinking, and our current business structure is not built for it. This system uses a form of motivation that is becoming increasingly counterintuitive.

So, which system is better?  What structure could allow for the betterment of both laborers and the businesses themselves?  And I’m going to do something a bit unconventional here, I’m not going to answer this question. I can not think of a solution that does not require ideal situations or one that is remotely feasible in this day and age.  

This is why I will leave you with a question with no answer.  Rather than writing a solution I do not totally agree with, or one I do not totally understand, I would like to hear your input.  So, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].