Love’s Labor Found

We talk a lot about motivation here at EPI. So while it’s a familiar topic, I still learned some things from the fourth week of my Dan Ariely online class on Behavioral Economics. Here are the things that particularly resonate:

• Efforts made in vain are actually demotivating. The purpose AND the actual use of work contribute to its meaning, and thus inspire or uninspire us to be motivated.
• Doing the same task over and over again, without a sense of purpose and without it actually being used, can be the ultimate demotivator, by a much greater degree than people realize.
• It’s relatively easy to make people feel good about their work by simply acknowledging it; after all, no one likes to be taken for granted. 
• In contrast, ignoring people—even to a slight degree—can be just as demotivating as destroying their work outright.
• The IKEA Effect: More labor leads to more love, but only when participants are able to complete their creations.
• While increased effort increases love, it also blinds us to the perspective of others. We become overly committed to our own ideas.
• When we work harder for something, we value it more—and we shift our beliefs to match our behaviors and convince ourselves that what we’ve just strived so hard to get must really be something special.
• Money is still an important motivator, but not the only one and not always the most effective one. While low and medium bonuses do get people to work harder, when it comes to mental/creative tasks, very large bonuses can cause performance to go down.
• For mental/creative tasks, a “state of flow” drives the highest quality performance. Once you get immersed in a task that has meaning for you, you can become completely absorbed in it, thinking about nothing but the task. (However, add in the factor of large bonuses, and you end up thinking about the money, not the task at hand.)