The Secret to Workplace Motivation: Autonomy + Mastery + Purpose

January 13 , 2009 by Mark Allen

In this short video, social scientist Dan Pink blows away conventional wisdom about workplace rewards. Bonuses, commissions, and incentives are all intended to sharpen employee thinking and accelerate creativity. However, we find for many tasks so called incentives create quite the opposite effect.

“As long as the task involved only MECHANICAL skill, bonuses work as they would be expected, the higher the pay the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to POORER performance”, revealed in the classic candle and thumbtack study by Karl Duncker.

Rewarding employees in the 21st century requires a dramatically different approach than we’ve been used to in the past. “This new operating system” Dan calls it, requires employees be offered three important conditions…Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

Here is what Ona Lage had to say about this in an earlier post, “His three elements that drive the new operating system for today’s business are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.” Interesting to note, they are the very same components for happiness: Autonomy – getting more pleasure from life, Mastery – becoming more engaged what you do and Purpose – making your life more meaningful.”

Mark Allen is Regional Manager in Northern California, for The Marlin Company. Mark is a writer, a speaker and networker, helping companies engage employees to higher levels of performance.

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