Holes

Several years ago (it seems like forever), our family spent just over a year in Augusta, Georgia.  I remember we moved into our brand new home (the builder had just finished it a week or so before we moved) right around the first of July, and the builder had decided to plant grass seed in the backyard rather than sodding it.  If you've ever spent time in Georgia, you know that the summers are very hot.  Grass doesn't grow too well in that heat, so our backyard stayed dry, dusty dirt for most of the summer.  My wife and I still joke about the time that our kids refused to "go out and play" because (1) it was too hot and (2) the backyard looked like the movie Holes!   

The 2003 movie Holes was based on a book of the same name by the author Louis Sachar.  The movie (and book) is about a wrongfully accused and convicted adolescent named Stanley Yelnats, who is sent to a juvenile correctional facility in the middle of dry lake bed in Texas.  The prisoners spend their days digging holes in the dry desert lake bed in order to "build character."  The warden is really making them dig holes to find a lost treasure.  The book won both the 1998 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal, and the movie was very popular with an all-star cast, including Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson, and Shia LaBeouf in his movie debut.  I won't spoil things by giving away the plot, except to say that thankfully I could not find any evidence that the highly venomous yellow spotted lizards truly exist!  Watch the movie - or better yet, read the book!

If you do watch the movie, you'll see very quickly that digging holes really seemed pointless to the prisoners.  It reminded me of the old chain gangs that pounded large rocks with sledgehammers in order to make smaller rocks ("Let's make work!").  Meaningless tasks are not very motivating - what's the point of doing a good job if the job means nothing at all?  I wrote about the meaning of work in a post earlier this month (see "The Search for Meaning"), specifically focusing on a study by the psychologist Dan Ariely which found that recognition and monetary awards can certainly motivate employees to improve their performance and/or productivity (even in an otherwise meaningless task).  However, the more compelling finding was that the study showed that attaching a "meaning" to the work also significantly improves performance and productivity!

I wanted to talk about a couple of other studies that I found when researching this topic.  Most of the investigators in this field believe that there are two kinds of motivation.  Intrinsic motivation involves performing a task or job for its personal reward or fulfillment, which can be as simple as the satisfaction we get from doing a job well.  In contrast, extrinsic motivation involves performing a task or job in order to receive an external reward (e.g., payment) or to avoid punishment (e.g., getting fired for not doing your job).  Importantly, the external reward doesn't have to be monetary in nature.  

Michael Kosfeld and Susanne Neckermann showed that even providing a largely symbolic award to workers (similar to an "Employee of the Month" recognition or plaque) improved productivity.  Undergraduate students were recruited to enter information into a database (a very monotonous task) without any direct supervision (so they could easily distract themselves by surfing the Internet or scrolling through their social media accounts).  Students were randomized to a recognition group or control group.  Students in the recognition group were told that the top performer would be personally recognized at the end of their work session.  These students increased their productivity (number of database entries) by 12% on average compared to the control group.

These same investigators followed up with a study comparing monetary and recognition incentives (as a source of extrinsic motivation) in the presence or absence of meaning. Here, "meaningful work" was defined as a task or job that is recognized by others and/or has some point or purpose.  They again recruited students to enter information into a database.  Students in the "high meaning" group were told that the information was vital to the successful completion of a research project, while students in the "low meaning" group were told that the information that they entered was likely never going to be used.  Students were also randomized to either a monetary incentive (payment for the number of database entries) or recognition incentive (a symbolic recognition similar to the study above).

"Meaning" significantly improved productivity (similar to the results of the study mentioned in my post "The Search for Meaning").  Both monetary and recognition incentives also improved productivity.  Monetary incentives improved productivity regardless of "meaning", while the recognition incentive only increased productivity when "meaning" was low.  In other words, recognition provides meaning to an otherwise meaningless task.

Studies performed as early as the 1950's have shown that giving external rewards for jobs or tasks that are intrinsically motivating can actually decrease the level of intrinsic motivation.  This particular effect has been called the "overjustification" or "crowding out" effect.  Two additional studies by Dan Ariely and his colleagues adds another layer of complexity to this argument.  Ariely suggests that there is a third form of motivation, called image motivation (also called signaling motivation), which is the drive to complete a task in order to improve people's perceptions of us.   For example, we are more likely to give to a charity if we gain the approval from others by doing so (the "lumpers" among us would argue that this is just another form of extrinsic motivation).  

Ariely conducted an experiment in which undergraduate students worked at a seemingly meaningless task for a charitable cause.  Monetary incentives for the work increased job performance only when they were given in private.  If it was visible to the public that the students were being paid for their activities, monetary incentives no longer had an effect on performance, i.e. there was evidence of a "crowding out effect."  Ariely talks about similar findings from a study by Richard Titmuss in the 1970's that showed that blood donations dropped when individuals starting getting paid to donate blood.  People want to be seen by others that they are doing good for the sake of doing good and not because they are being paid for it.  

There's one last wrinkle to this discussion.  Ariely and his colleague James Heyman suggested that there are two types of markets at play - a monetary market and a social market (see "Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets").  When people are working with a monetary market framework, increasing the monetary (or even nonmonetary) incentives will result in an increase in job performance and/or productivity.  In contrast, when people are working within a social market framework, the degree of effort that individuals employ is based upon their altruism.  Monetary incentives in this case will result in the "crowding out effect" described above.

Imagine that you are getting ready to move your apartment.  You ask your friends for help.  Do you pay them?  If so, do you pay them back with money or do you give them dinner and a few beers?  The results from Heyman and Ariely's study suggest that if you do offer to pay your friends back, you will shift them from a social market framework to a monetary one.  As such, their willingness to help (as well as their effort) will increase with the amount of money and/or gifts you promise to give them in return for their help.  They also found that sometimes, your friends would exert a greater effort in the absence of a promise to pay them than if you offered to pay them for a trivial amount.

Clearly, humans are complicated creatures!  Collectively, all of these studies suggest that the warden in the movie Holes would have increased the prisoner's effort and motvation by:

1. Providing them with simple recognition at the end of the day (perhaps giving an award for the prisoner who dug their hole the fastest during the day)

2. Giving them meaning or a reason to dig (not to "build character"), perhaps by telling them they were digging for a buried treasure (though that's complicated too)

There are lessons here for leaders and managers too.  Leadership is all about motivating your team to perform at their best.  Leaders and managers would do well to understand the nuances between intrinsic, extrinsic, and image motivation!