What Are The Real Work Motivators?

What motivates us at work?

“When we think about how people work, the naïve intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze,” says behavioural economist Dan Ariely. “We really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labour market looks like.”

When you look carefully at the way people work, he says, you find out there’s a lot more at play — and a lot more at stake — than money. Ariely can cite evidence that we are also driven by performing meaningful work, by others’ acknowledgement and by the amount of effort we’ve put in: the harder the task is, the prouder we tend to be.

During the Industrial Revolution, Ariely points out, Adam Smith’s efficiency-oriented, assembly-line approach made sense. But it doesn’t work as well in today’s knowledge economy. Instead, Ariely upholds Karl Marx’s concept that we care much more about a product if we’ve participated from start to finish rather than producing a single part over and over. In other words, in the knowledge economy, efficiency is no longer more important than meaning.

“When we think about labour, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it: meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.,” Ariely explains.

To hear more on Ariely’s thoughts about what makes people more productive and happier at work, watch this fascinating TED talk.