Pizza Party!

Wow, did I miss a big opportunity!  Apparently, yesterday (February 9th) was National Pizza Day.  Well, it's always better to be late than never, I suppose.  I have always been a HUGE fan of pizza.  As a matter of fact, I am hoping to build an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven in our backyard this summer!  Here are a couple of "pizza fun facts":

1. According to the Yale Food Addiction Scale (who knew there was such a thing?!?!?), pizza is ranked as the food most associated with addictive-like eating behaviors.  As it turns out, everyone loves pizza!

2. Apparently, in the late 1960's, the U.S. Army's 113 Military Intelligence Unit delivered pizzas in order to spy on reports and politicians (see the article "Pizza" in The New Yorker for more).

3. This past January, a group in Los Angeles, California worked with Pizza Hut and YouTube star Airrack to set a new record for the world's largest pizza.  The pizza was 13,990 square feet!  Here's a great picture (from the CNN website):

4. Paul Fenech traveled 12,346.6 miles from Madrid to Wellington, New Zealand in order to hand-deliver a pizza to Niko Apostolakis in 2006.  While I don't know if there is a world record for the longest pizza delivery, I bet this one would take the cake (or should I say, "take the pie"?).

5. Apparently, Pizza Hut once delivered a pizza to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania!  It's in the Guinness Book of World Records.

6. And finally, while I beg to differ, apparently the city of Portland, Oregon was recently rated by "Modernist Pizza" as the best pizza city in the United States (come on, where's Chicago?).

Enough about pizza you say, right?  What does pizza have to do with leadership?  Well, as it turns out, there is some method to my madness.  I actually came across another very interesting field experiment conducted by Dan Ariely (I've posted about a number of Ariely's studies in the past - see "Are trick-or-treaters honest?", "The IKEA effect", and "Prisoner 24601" for a few of my favorites) that involved, of all things, pizza!  In full disclosure, I came across a rather cynical post on my Twitter feed about hospital administrators and pizza parties.  However, after actually reading the study, I think there are some rather important findings that actually have more to do with intrinsic motivation than extrinsic motivation (another favorite topic of mine - see "Lessons from Gross Anatomy" and "Holes").

Ariely and his team worked with a large global high-tech semiconductor manufacturing plant in Israel and measured changes in productivity after implementing four different incentive bonus plans (see the full publication, "It's (not) all about the Jacksons: Testing different types of short-term bonuses in the field").  The experiment involved 156 employees, whose productivity (in terms of the quantity and quality of chips manufactured) was measured for 3 weeks before the intervention to determine a baseline.  Employees were told about the incentive program, which they earned by increasing their productivity on Day 1 of the study - the bonus was delivered on Day 2, and then all incentives stopped until the following week, when the bonus changed per the experiment's protocol.  Realistically, very few, if any, incentive programs are set up in this fashion.  However, I still think the results are quite interesting. 

As I mentioned, four different incentive bonuses were used (and all employees participated in each of the incentive bonus programs).  First, employees received cash compensation in the amount of US $25.  Second, employees received a voucher to purchase a pizza dinner for their family (cash equivalent US $25).  Third, employees received verbal recognition from their direct supervisor.  In the final plan, employees could choose between either the cash or the pizza voucher. 

Ariely and his team found that using incentive bonuses did, in fact, increase productivity.  The increase in productivity was higher for employees receiving the pizza voucher and verbal reward, though the differences were not statistically significant.  They also found that the increase in productivity returned back to baseline once the incentives were removed, consistent with prior research in this area (once the extrinsic motivation to perform is removed, employees no longer feel the need to exert the extra effort required to increase productivity).  The drop in productivity was greatest for the cash reward, but again the differences were not statistically significant.  Overall, the verbal reward appeared to be the most effective at increasing productivity!

Apparently, Ariely published slightly different results in his new book Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (for a summary of these findings, see an online article here).  Here, Ariely found that the pizza voucher performed better than the cash rewards.  What's important to recognize is that cash incentives aren't always the best incentives to work harder.  Recognition from the boss or organization may be an even more effective way to motivate employees to work hard - whatever the organization can do to make their employees feel valued (and that can even include a voucher for a family pizza meal apparently).

Collectively, most of the work in this area has been fairly consistent.  Dbo Au writes in "How Pizza Magically Enhances Productivity" that "the best way to motivate employees and increase their productivity is to pay them a fair wage and make them feel valued by the company."  Sometimes, simply recognizing an employee for a job well done can go a long way.