It’s been a long time since I worked on incentive programs and there may be new models, but here’s basically what I learned.
When you’re talking about intangible rewards, a boss who is sparing with praise seems to get better results than a boss who continually compliments everyone for everything.
But when it comes to tangible rewards (bonuses, rewards, trips to Vegas, etc.) workers want to know that there are clear guidelines and goals. Any incentive program that even smells of randomness triggers what you might call the “THAT’S NOT FAIR!” effect, which actually damages morale and productivity.
The other thing which works with humans and not rats is that a tiny little award (a pen, plaque, certificate or parking spot near the door) that’s publicly acknowledged has much more impact than, say, a more substantial bonus that simply shows up on your paycheck but never gets mentioned.
Boy I hear this one a lot but I still have a difficult time believing it’s true. They recently changed our employee anniversary recognition program from choosing a gift from a catalog at 5 and 10 years, to a “mention” in the company newsletter. I can only speak from personal experience, but who gives a rat’s ass about being mentioned in a newsletter?
The rat, I imagine, and no one else. Put me down as another one who has major :dubious: about this theory. Keep yer stinkin’ pen/newsletter mention/plaque, and gimme more $. It’s all about the Benjamins, yo.
I manage a company Web site. In reviewing the page hit statistics for the site, one thing that fascinated me was that by far the articles that consistently got the most hits were the ones listing names of employees who were being recognized. In addition, if someone was not included in a recognition list for whatever reason, or their name was misspelled, I heard about it immediately. Employees may not read anything else on the site, but they do want to see their name in lights – and see who else is named.
I’ve never heard this called the “addiction model”, it’s Operant Conditioning with an Intermittent ReinforcementSchedule.
But yes, it works to boost productivity, which is why it is used in workplaces. And schools. And sales. And parenting. And pretty much anywhere else you’re trying to shape behavior.
People are clearly motivated by inanimate objects with variable reward schedules (e.g. slot machines, mmorpgs). But my WAG is that people won’t be so easily motivated by a human that uses the same variable reward schedule. That sort of employer would be seen as arbitrary and capricious, unfair, inscrutable, or just a right bastard.
One issue is how prestigious the mention or recognition is. A newsletter doesn’t sound as exciting to me as something more obvious or public.
A second issue is that what people say is not always what they really mean. A mention in a newsletter costs the company nothing. If they rewarded you with a $0.50 pen as a gift, would that have satisfied you more than the public recognition? If the company has a $0 budget for rewards and you want them to have a $100 budget, you’ll always be dissatisfied.
But you also have to recognize that everyone has different motivations. If we say “Money is less effective a motivator than personal recognition,” we only need 51% of workers to agree in order to make it a true statement.
True dat. Even more, what people *think *motivates them may not, in fact, produce motivation. Operant conditioning works. There are decades of research into it, on rats and pigeons and on people. And no matter what people think they want, they do more, buy more and spend more when operant conditioning is in place than when it isn’t.
Really, a fixed reward schedule is already in place: it’s your paycheck. The intermittent schedule is the extra bits that make people produce more than the minimum required for the paycheck. They produce more if, sometimes but not always, their efforts are extra rewarded - though those rewards vary in effectiveness, of course. But if you make that regular, it’s actually less motivating than if you make it irregular. People come to expect it, and internalize it as part of their paycheck, and productivity falls to paycheck-only levels.
Thank you! I like to learn the correct terms for things. When you have a ‘concept’ in your head it is sometimes hard to just google for it. Now I can sound smarter at dinner parties, not to mention it will be a bit easier to find and read more on the topic
Wow, I just realized that reading threads on a message board where sometimes, seemingly at random, you get a response you like is Operant Conditioning! This is actually pretty fascinating (and a bit scary) stuff.
You’re very welcome. I studied WAY too much psychology and child development in high school and college. Glad it’s useful to someone!
Have you heard/read about the ping-pong-playing-pigeons yet? They crack me up. The guy most responsible for bringing about the study of Operant Conditioning in the US, BF Skinner, taught pigeons to play ping pong!
Is Reinforcement related to the digging mice experiment? I don’t remember where I read about it, or how long ago, but I read an article on mice that had been taught to dig for their food.
It was stated in the article that the mice did not have an instinct to dig for food, so that the experimenters had first established a feeding area and then slowly increased the amount of sand that was laid down on top of it. In the end, the mice would dig several inches to reach their food.
Then the sand was kept in the area, but the food was placed on the surface. The mice would still dig. They would eat the food first, but then they would dig. This kept up long after the time when it would be expected that they would have learned that there would be no food there.
It had become a habit. The experimenters hypothesized (according to the article writer) that digging in the sand had become linked with the memory of reward and was now a reward in itself. Digging was its own reward.
I remember reading it and thinking of the mice saying: “Back in my day a mouse had to dig for its food. Mice today just don’t know how to dig any more.”
I once heard of a giant company that learned of this ‘trick’. They put it to use by painting random lines down the hallway and randomly selecting one lab employee per day to wear a red lab coat. Had some of the intended effects, but in the end the entire program (irrespective of how brilliant it was) got canceled after only two years.
Pretty much, and it’s another excellent example of how intermittent rewards are superior to constant rewards for molding behavior. They didn’t get food every time they dug, even when the food was buried - sometimes they dug where there was no food. So even when the food wasn’t buried, they still kept “looking” for it. To anthropomorphize a bit, they were “thinking”: “Maybe THIS time there will be food there again!”
If you give a mouse a reward every single time he digs, and then you stop giving him that reward, then his digging (the behavior) will stop (extinguish) quite rapidly. They “think”, “well, that was a nice gravy train, but it’s over now.” If you only give him the reward sometimes, the behavior takes a lot longer to extinguish.
ETA: but, as the researchers speculate, you can get this a bit tangled up if the behavior itself *becomes *the reward. In parenting and workplace management, this would be a wonderful thing - if your kids cleaned their room because it was fun, or the employee completed his quarterly reports on time because it gave him pleasure. But it’s not something you can count on.
