The surprising truth about what motivates us.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: The Bookshelf

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Daniel H. Pink

Riverhead Hardcover 2011, 288 pages

(paerback), $16.00

The graying of the workforce and how to recruit a new generation of public servants has been a persistent and rising concern of public managers in recent years. At the same time, state and local government agencies have always needed to make the most of their limited resources, including human resources. In Drive, Daniel Pink challenges the common assumption that the best ways to improve performance and increase productivity in organizations are rewards and punishments for good and bad behaviors. This assumption underlies much of the traditional thinking about how to attract workers and how to motivate them once they are on the job. This assumption is so entrenched because it has served society well for a long time. It was effective for maintaining production in large factories and the other kinds of organizations that were common in the industrial era. However, as we move further away from the industrial era, its management systems begin to lose their relevancy--including the system of motivation. Pink posits that the traditional view of motivation is often incompatible with modern realities in three ways.

First, we are coming to rely more on volunteer efforts to get work done. A striking example is Wikipedia--a pure volunteer effort that that has essentially made the traditional encyclopedia obsolete. Government is becoming well acquainted with this trend too. More governments are pursuing public service objectives through third-party for-benefit organizations, like charities and social entrepreneurs. Some governments are even crowdsourcing work to individual volunteers, such as by sponsoring "hackathons" to build mobile applications for solve social problems. The traditional reward-and-punishment perspective does not help us understand why these new volunteer-driven methods of work even are possible, much less how to use them to their maximum potential.

Second, the traditional view of motivation is strongly linked to the traditional view of economics: people will rationally calculate how to maximize their own self-interest and then act accordingly. If this were true, a system of rewards and punishments to appeal to self-interest would be an effective form of motivation. However, a raft of experimental evidence has now shown the people are far from purely self-interested, rational utility maximizers. If classic...