Gainful Employment →
Thanks, Quad.
In the business world, however, we too often stop at that second drive. We organise our enterprises around the belief that the way to improve performance is through an elaborate architecture of carrots and sticks. If we reward the behaviour we seek, and punish the behaviour we dislike, individuals will perform at a high level and their organisations will flourish. Or so the theory goes. In the 19th and 20th century, that approach – enacted in businesses large and small on both sides of the Atlantic – had a sturdy logic. Indeed, it works quite well when people are doing relatively simple, routine, rule-based work, whether this involves turning a screw on an assembly line or processing paper in an office.
Trouble is, that kind of work has largely disappeared in western Europe and North America. In the 21st century, most white-collar workers do jobs that require at least some non-routine, heuristic, creative, conceptual capabilities. And a half-century of research in behavioural science, carried out in laboratories and field experiments around the world, shows that for this sort of work, the approach we use with donkeys – carrots and sticks – is rarely effective and sometimes harmful.
