How Not to Demotivate Your Faculty: Drive, by Daniel Pink

Since the Head was replaced, things have changed dramatically and everything at the school seems much more professional. Teachers adhere to a strict dress code, clock in (and out) on time, submit detailed lesson plans, and go through thorough performance reviews, with the opportunity to earn bonuses. As a consequence, academic results have dropped, and the once fantastic school spirit is now nowhere to be found. What went wrong?

Incentives and Disincentives
The problem, as Drive author Daniel Pink would explain, is that the new Head implemented a system based on “carrots and sticks”. However such external consequences have a number of undesirable effects:

• Narrowed focus. As psychologists figured out a long time ago, contingent (“if…, then…”) reinforcement is useful to teach specific behaviors. However, this is only effective if the reinforced behavior is the desired behavior, and not a proxy for a greater goal. For instance, the goal of taking attendance is to take attendance. As such, it is an appropriate candidate for reinforcement. Most teaching behaviors are not like that, though: they do not have value in and of themselves, but only insofar as they facilitate student learning. In their case, rewards and punishments will only lead to a tokenistic approach losing sight of the bigger picture. Worse, it can even lead to counterproductive shortcuts. Checks for understanding are certainly important, but if teachers are specifically evaluated on this item, their use might become artificial and defeat its purpose, modeling for students how to play the school system rather than engage in authentic learning. As Pink explains, behaviorism works fine for “algorithmic” tasks where issues are straightforward and solutions linear; but it is completely unadapted for “heuristic” tasks that require thinking and creative problem-solving. Teaching is really an art, which means that it cannot be guided by predetermined rules.

• Decreased performance. In his book, Pink does not only mention psychological studies showing that players are more creative when driven by fun than by extrinsic rewards; he also mentions studies demonstrating the negative impact of the latter on performance (even on simple tasks) due to increased stress and, in some cases, decreased cooperation.

• Diminished interest. If the “Sawyer effect” can help turn chores into games, extrinsic rewards tend to do the opposite. This is due to a psychological phenomenon known as “overjustification”, whereby the pursuit of an activity for its own sake comes to be attributed to and conditioned by the obtention of rewards once it starts being reinforced. In other words, incentives can be addictive, and kill intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic Rewards
More generally, this Head of school’s mistake was their assumption that unless externally motivated by rewards and punishments, teachers would not put any effort in their work. In line with Self-Determination Theory, human beings are actually intrinsically motivated to expend energy in productive ways, unless they are deprived of one or more of the following—which is exactly what reinforcement does:

• Autonomy. People lose motivation when their lack of voice and choice gives them an external locus of control. Deprived of responsibility, they become passive and disengaged. Such is the case, e.g., when they cannot decide when to work, what to work on, how to complete their work, etc. Even rewards can be misplaced if they are perceived as micromanagement.

• Competence. Demotivation also emerges when tasks make people feel inadequate. In this sense, rewards can be effective if they provide unexpected, timely, meaningful feedback, and signal mastery. However, the very existence of a “carrots and sticks” system can still make people feel like their abilities are not trusted.

• Relatedness. Trust is precisely one of the positive human relationships that people crave because they make their efforts valuable, i.e., meaningful. In addition to inducing competition and signaling distrust, or at least hierarchy and distance, reinforcements can undermine the sense of purpose and self-transcendence that can be derived from work. 

Entrusting teachers with the responsibility to address broad challenges, the Head will be able to unleash these three intrinsic rewards, reignite their school’s spirit, and boost its performance. Following the example of many successful companies, this could include giving the faculty: 

• The option to form their own teams.
• The freedom to set their own goals and devise their own solutions.
• The unstructured time needed to innovate collaboratively.

Comment
If “flow” is the name of this mental state in which individuals are absorbed in a task that makes them feel, at the same time, challenged, in control, and successful; the addition of relatedness and purpose transforms this experience into the exhilarating sense of efficacy that Durkheim called “collective effervescence”.

Reference

Pink, D. H. (2011). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Riverhead Books.