Punished by Rewards
Criticizes the system of motivating through reward, offering arguments for motivating people by working with them instead of doing things to them.
Stats for nerds
31recommend
90mentions
49people
2007–2026years
68% recommend31% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner . . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of studies and written about that in his book Punished by Rewards. It's one of the books I try to give away to friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject. The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that they're doing something totally different this time and they can ignore all the previous data.
- If you think that Bezos was motivated to create amazon because the taxes were just-so, you're delusional.
There are numerous books on this topic. Obviously not everyone agrees with them, but Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" is an excellent starting point for reading about what we know about the connections between motivation, creativity and rewards.
- There's a good book, Punished By Rewards.
- No. 1. Don’t play with people. 2. Be honest and fair. 3. Hire people who follow those points.
I’m a fan of Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards
- You're so eager to take offense, you're imagining I'm someone different than who I am, and that I'm saying something different than what I'm saying.
I'm a programmer who advises software leaders on how to create effective software development organizations. I didn't get here by burning the midnight oil; I got here by understanding software development—and getting lucky. I adopted Extreme Programming back in 1999, had notable successes, and people wanted to learn from my experience.
I'm saying that people work most effectively when they are intrinsically motivated. This is well supported by books such as Alfie Kohn's _Punished By Rewards,_ and more recently popularized by Daniel Pink.
The job of the manager is to support that motivation: to provide context and resources (I don't mean people); to trust people to do a good job; to put decisions about work processes in the hands of the people doing the work. And yes, to hire people who are worthy of that trust, and who work well in that sort of environment, and to remove people who are not.
This is not about working long hours, or taking advantage of people. It's about doing work that you can be proud of, in an environment that supports doing your best work, with a team that's jelled, creating things that are better than you can create alone.
If you've never been in that kind of environment, it might seem like an impossible dream, or even a cynical ploy to pay less.
It's not.
- I was always told that tipping was To Insure Prompt Service. It wasn't until later that I realized that you tip AFTER the meal. Also, most people tip or don't tip regardless of service... Then I read "Punished by Rewards" and realized that tipping makes service WORSE!
