A debate over motivation

Are monetary rewards effective?

• In this video Dan Pink argues that monetary incentives are bad motivators. He says much the same in this is  video of his TED talk. 
• Mark Fidelman challenges the assertions by Dan Pink in this article. . 
• This video is Paul Solman's story on Pink. 
• Here is an article from Time that claims to identify 9 things that motivate better than money.
• In this article authors at Wharton argue that monetary rewards typically boost productivity by 42% to 49%. They also point out flaws associated with monetary rewards.
• At around the 5:00 minute mark of this video, Edwards Deming talks about what he sees as the flaws of annual performance evaluation and merit raises.
• In this article, an author at Stern argues that any performance measure is flawed and concludes that we need to work constantly to improve what we have and to exercise judgement when we attempt to apply whatever we have.

If you want my thoughts, please read on.

Monetary rewards AND non-monetary rewards matter. I often engage students in a discussion of motivation and how employers can align the interest of employees with the interests of employers or owners. I stress the importance of rewarding desired behavior or results and not rewarding undesirable behavior or results and that creating a compensation scheme that does both is difficult. I also point out that things other than money matter. A firm that is functioning well will use both monetary and non-monetary rewards to reinforce desirable behavior and will use each predominately when and where that method is most effective.