People work for more motives than money.

I’m a sucker for behavioral economics, which means that Dan Ariely’s book the “Upside of Irrationality” most definitely makes my reading list. Today driving home from work I heard Dan interviewed on NPR. Here’s the audio of the interview:

The bit that stood out to me was an experiment that Dan conducted with legos. In this experiment, he used two scenarios involving lego robots. In the first scenario, people built robots, one after another, and were paid on a diminishing scale. It was up to the participants to decide when the benefit of building robots was not sufficient, and then they stopped.

The second scenario took place using the same conditions, but after each robot was created, the experimenters disassembled the robot before the eyes of the participants.

In the second scenario, participants stopped far sooner, and reported that they enjoyed the act of creation less. And when the experimenters asked how much people enjoyed legos in general, those who enjoyed legos in general persisted in their task longer. But in the second scenario there was no correlation.

Ariely postulates that the negative effects of the second scenario are due to the fact that when the creations of one’s labor are destroyed before their eyes, they joy of the task is choked out of it. As a result, people gave up much faster, and enjoyed the job less. In other words, when we destroy the meaning of a person’s job, we jeopardize both their satisfaction and their motivation.

This all seems obvious, but at work we are rarely building lego robots (darn). Instead, we are building a report, or a design, or a full fledged product. Not everything everyone does will be correct, or successful. But the key take-away that I received from Ariely’s research is that in order to support motivation, it is crucial for managers to recognize the hard work that people put into their creations. And if the work isn’t right, the next step is to provide a higher level meaning to the critique (or the destruction), in order to maintain motivation.