Payoff

Ariely's short book examines what actually motivates people at work, arguing that the standard model in which people trade effort for money describes almost nothing about human motivation.

His evidence comes from his own experiments. In one, workers at a semiconductor plant were offered a cash bonus, a pizza voucher or a compliment from a manager for meeting a target; the pizza and the compliment produced better results than the cash, and the cash group performed worse than the control group over the week. In another, participants built Lego models; when the models were disassembled in front of them as they built the next one, output fell sharply compared with a group whose models were stored, even though payment was identical. In another, participants wrote a document; those whose work was shredded without being read produced far less than those whose work was acknowledged, and acknowledgement required only that a supervisor glance at it.

His conclusion is that meaning, defined minimally as evidence that the work matters to someone, is a more powerful motivator than money, and that organisations destroy meaning without noticing through cancelled projects, unread reports and work that never reaches a user.

The book is short and readable, based on Ariely's own studies. Several of Ariely's published findings have been questioned and one of his papers was retracted over data problems in the underlying dataset, which is a reason to treat specific results here with caution while the general direction is supported by other researchers' work.

Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University who runs experiments on how people misjudge value.

Predictably Irrational reports controlled experiments showing that valuation errors are systematic and repeatable: relative comparison, the pull of free, the effect of price on expected quality. The findings bear directly on pricing, bundling, incentive design and any forecast that assumes rational buyers.

Duke University