Respond to at least two of your classmates' postings. Responses should be at least 100 words or more

Nafisah Raji (students name)

 In theory, when you Reward people with bonuses, commissions, or incentives, you get better results. From the perspective of Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Business is built around extrinsic motivators, using the carrot and stick approach which worked in earlier centuries but does not work for 21st-century motivators. Rewards by their very nature narrow the focus and concentrate the mind but for the real problems, we want to train employees to look around and expand their search for solutions even on the periphery.

Management is great if you want compliance but if you want engagement, self-direction or autonomy works better. Giving people lots of radical amounts of autonomy works more efficiently for organizational growth.

In a ROWE, people don’t have schedules but just get their work done. How they do it, where they do it and when they do it has no bearing on their delivery. This way, productivity goes up, workers' engagement goes up and revenue goes up.

The key takeaways for me are summarized in the mismatch between what science knows and what businesses do. Science knows that:

· 20th-century rewards that we thought were the natural part of business motivation work but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.

· The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishment but the unseen intrinsic drive to do things because they matter

· Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Employ autonomy instead

If we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, if we bring our notions of motivations into the 21st century, we can strengthen our differences, solve a lot of problems, and change how we do business.

Given the current pandemic and the plight of overworked health workers, this information is of value to me because we saw some organizations try to offer more pay to nurses in acute care facilities. It worked for a short time, but burnout and the lack of self-direction and autonomy pushed a lot of health workers to quit during the pandemic. Also, people are prone to mistakes when they are not allowed to exercise autonomy. If more healthcare workers were looking outside the narrow perspective, the pandemic might have been contained much earlier.

I will utilize the takeaway on employee autonomy by encouraging employees to take a half-day once a month to brainstorm ideas on technology, performance improvement, and patient safety. I believe in the brainstorming, ideas that would revolutionize my organization will be presented just like the FedEx practice of the Atlassian company.

References

Jurkiewicz, C. L., Massey, T. K., & Brown, R. G. (1998). Motivation in Public and Private Organizations: A Comparative Study. Public Productivity & Management Review, 21(3), 230–250. 

The puzzle of motivation. Dan Pink. YouTube. Retrieved from 

Week 2 Discussion 2

Laura Ponce De Leon (students name)

Daniel Pink makes some valid points in his Ted Talk about motivation and problem solving. The candle problem was an awesome example of working outside the box, and thinking intuitively. For many, there were apparent solutions which involved using the thumb tacks to tack the candle to the wall which resulted in failure. The tack reciprocal seemed unusable due to it having one purpose, which was to house the tacks. The use of incentives only worked when there was one clear answer. It is interesting that the reward system worked best for easy tasks, rather than a task that took critical thinking. The concept of an incentive on a hard task does not necessarily have a better outcome, and can cause more stress for the employees involved. The MIT example Daniel covered made it even more apparent that the high incentives made people do worse. One takeaway from the video is to not stress the importance of incentives, or to try to stray away from them. I feel like in some cases they work, but overall it can cause a disruption in the workplace, "According to numerous studies in laboratories, workplaces, classrooms, and other settings, rewards typically undermine the very processes they are intended to enhance. The findings suggest that the failure of any given incentive program is due less to a glitch in that program than to the inadequacy of the psychological assumptions that ground all such plans." (Kohn, 2014) He mentioned how Google has an innovative dynamic which allowed employees to use 20% time. This allowed employees to use their time to work on whatever they please. This method allowed Google to create new ideas without the stress of regular tasks. It can potentially limit employees when faced with repetitive tasks, "Built-in limitations: Incentives work best with repetitive tasks, and lose effectiveness quickly when the required cognitive skills increase. Incentives might encourage production-line workers to increase throughput, for example, but they’re more likely to produce stress among IT developers, engineers, etc. Focusing on productivity can negatively influence quality." (I-admin, 2022) Using ideology from these successful companies can be transferred to healthcare. With the added stress of COVID-19 the last thing healthcare workers need is the added pressure of an incentive. If they do have to be used, maybe use something that doesn't involve pay. Using alternatives to incentives may produce better healthcare outcomes. One example would be to use job rotation to offer new tasks for employees, and to remove monotonous work. This could potentially increase motivation due to the change of scenery. Alternatives that do not revolve around an earnings should be promoted, while stress inducing incentives should be avoided. 

I-admin. (2022). Advantages & disadvantages of employee incentives. i. Retrieved April 11, 2022, from  

Kohn , A. (2014, August 1). Why incentive plans cannot workA. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved April 11, 2022, from