The Complexities of Motivation
In 2010, I was working as a Middle School Science teacher at a small school in Ecuador. Unlike my time at an American School, when teachers showed up early to prep and ready their classrooms, most Ecuadorian teachers arrived on the busses with the students. As a result, it became a common trend for all the teachers to be arriving with the students right at 8am, giving everyone just a few minutes to get situated before the first bell. The head of the school, an American, tried to change this habit by implementing a sign-in system. When we arrived at the school, we had to use an electronic thumb print system to prove we were there. If the system showed we arrived after 7:55am, we would be docked pay.
This system was a classic example of "carrot and stick" motivation. With this type of motivation, if they had chosen "the carrot" then they would have hoped to entice teachers to arrive earlier by rewarding those that did. Instead, they chose "the stick" and punished those that arrived late. With this type of motivation they were hoping the fear of losing money would be enough to encourage teachers to come earlier. The system did not last long because it did not work, I only thought of it this week when listening to Daniel H. Pink's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Pink describes a similar situation in a day care in Israel where the parents were arriving late to pick up their children. To combat the tardiness, the day care center chose to fine the parents every time they picked up their child past 4pm. They tracked the tardiness of all the parents and discovered that once the "stick" motivation was implemented, parents were more likely to pick their kids up late. In other words, the plan backfired; not only did it not improve the numbers, but it made them worse.
As someone who experienced this first hand, I understand why. As a teacher I had an intrinsic motivation to arrive on time, meaning the desire to be a good teacher and be punctual was something that no one had to try and create in me, it was already there. This is a motivation that works most of the time. If the head of school wanted more teachers to arrive early, he should have worked to strengthen our intrinsic motivation rather than introduce extrinsic motivation, a.k.a. carrots and sticks. What Pink covers in numerous studies in this book and what the day care center studied showed, is that once a carrot or stick enters a situation it changes everything. It may work for the short term, but in the long term it will not only stop working, but it will destroy any intrinsic motivation that was there.
The day care center learned through the study that the students that were originally arriving on time had strong relationships with the teachers (high intrinsic motivation). However, once the fine was introduced (extrinsic motivation) it no longer was about the relationship and instead became transactional; the parents saw it as buying more time when they needed it.
If you are struggling to stay with some of your goals, take a few minutes to think about the type of motivation you are introducing. While there are limited situations when carrot and stick motivation works (more on that next week), all the research points to the need for an internal desire to do something. If you can figure out what that is and reinforce it, you will be far more likely to stick with it - no pun intended ;)
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