I ran across an article in The Harvard Business Review last week that I found very intriguing. The article was written by Dr. Samuel Bowles.
Dr. Bowles is an Economics Professor at the University of Siena and he specializes in the study of how economic issues affect human behavior. While the financial information is interesting (especially in today’s economic environment), what struck me was the human behavior side of his research.
Dr. Bowles sited two examples where incentives were supposed to produce a desired result, but backfired. The first example concerned asking people to donate blood. An English social researcher, Richard Titmuss, first hypothesized in the 1950's that if you offer to pay someone to give blood, the blood supply would be significantly reduced.
At the time, people thought he was crazy, but the research later proved him correct. Studies have since shown that offering to pay people to give blood, in fact, decreases the number willing to donate by almost half. In follow-up studies, the same clinics allowed the blood donors to contribute the payment to charity, and the trend was then reversed.
The lesson here is that motivation is a tricky thing to tap. If you’re a manager or responsible for coaching someone, it is important to learn what motivates people. What seems intuitive on the surface may not produce the anticipated result.
For this specific case, there is an underlying principle that explains this behavior. Rather than give you the answer (which I learned by reading the HBR article), I thought I’d give you the opportunity to ponder the puzzle on your own...
Tomorrow, I'll elaborate with a similar example and connect the dots.
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