I don’t know about you – and I think I am a member of a very small tribe – but I find many new words and expressions emerging in language every year, if not daily, often grate. I’m not so reactionary as to reject all new words – especially where there is a clear need for the word, but the new word or usage should uplift the language and improve human intercourse. (More on this in next month’s post, Two Sides of a Living Language.)
Incentivize is one of those words. A word ugly to the ear and, in my view, offensive to the mind. What’s wrong with simply ‘incent’, one might ask?
A close cousin of gamification (which I talked about in my last blog post), ‘incentivize’ is the current term used to designate external interventions intended to ‘motivate’ particular behaviour. Incentivize is a verb derived from the noun incentive. Incentives are those things assumed to appeal to a person’s drive to satisfy certain needs.
But the word incentivize suggests something more insidious than merely stimulating the pursuit of a desired thing or outcome, it connotes an action intended to serve the interests of the person offering the incentive, not just of the person being incented.
To me there is something coercive, unethical, deceitful in the notion of incentivize. It goes to B. F. Skinner’s theory of behavior modification, the concept of rewards and punishment in training of rats in a laboratory, dogs in a show ring, or humans in society. I’m not sure skinnerism is unethical in laboratory rats, but surely it is an afront to human dignity and autonomy.
Irrespective of the ethics of operant conditioning, there may also be a question of efficacy. Skinner was not offering a theory of motivation, per se, but a process by which subjects could be trained to do things in a certain way through reinforcement of behaviour. Were the rats incentivized by the prospect of a food reward when they took the correct turns in navigating a maze, or are they inherently wired to explore underground passages? Are poodles anticipating the treat reward, or merely instinctively acting to fetch a fowl and return with it to the pack?
So what actually motivates behaviour in animals (hedgehogs, hawks and humans)? There have been many theories of motivation offered over the last century or so, many of which reflect the civilizing effects of modern social thinking and conditions. These days, blunt force is generally frowned upon.
The best known of these may be Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs hypothesis; developed in the 1930s, Maslow never claimed his concept represented a true account of how people may be motivated to behave in particular ways.
In Maslow’s Hierarchy, it was postulated that people seek to satisfy innate needs beginning at a basic level and progressing to higher order needs as lower ones are satisfied. Management gurus of the time (and largely still applied today) recommended that organizations wishing to cause employees to behave and perform in desired ways, and at yet higher levels of performance, must offer those employees the means by which they can satisfy these various needs: money and resources to secure a family and a home, benefits and working conditions that provided for safety and security. For most organizations that was enough. These architects may not have recognized that the organization had any role to play in people seeking to satisfy higher order needs (Esteem and Self-actualization).
Maslow’s hierarchy may have listed human needs and wants that people seek and that organizations can take account of in engaging people in an employment relationship, but is it the offering of the benefit (the incentive) that causes the behaviour, or is it something else?
Of all the issues managers have to deal with, so suggest management gurus, one of the biggest challenges is – how to motivate workers to achieve the desired results of the department, division or company. In executive coaching practice, and my book, The Dynamics of Management I advised readers and clients this important truth: you can’t ‘motivate’ employees to do anything! (And you can’t ‘incentivise’ them either.) People motivate themselves. What a manager can do, importantly, is create the conditions necessary for the employee to self-motivate.
My long-admired compensation guru, Frederick Herzberg, wrote books on the subject, and many articles for the Harvard Business Review: ‘One More Time, How Do You Motivate People?’ Daniel Pink recycled Herzberg’s theories into current context. But both made the same claim: you cannot motivate people, they motivate themselves. Herzberg said you may be able to move somebody but not motivate him: like a donkey, you can ‘incentivise’ him with a carrot, or move him with a stick, but if the donkey doesn’t really want to pull that cart, he won’t, and after a time will become inured to the carrot, and the stick, and stop pulling that cart: beat him all you want, he’s no longer moving.
Herzberg, building on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, offered it was not the incentive (or the pay and conditions of work) that motivates improved behaviour but what those things represent. It’s not the money that motivates but the status that money conveys. Herzberg distinguished between extrinsic ‘motivators’ (which he called ‘hygiene factors’, (and correlates to Maslow’s lower-level needs)) from intrinsic ‘motivators’ (elements internal to the person, correlating to Maslow’s higher-level needs); he offered that only intrinsic motivators make a difference in achieving higher levels of performance in the long term. The person may be ‘motivated’ to take a job for hygiene needs (Safety, Survival and Security), but eventually will seek opportunities for meeting Esteem needs and ‘Self-actualization’. It should be made clear that Herzberg didn’t mean that higher level needs could only be achieved in intellectual jobs. Instead, he argued, higher level needs can be satisfied in any occupational category where the activities of the job match the preferences in the performer of those activities; it’s the work itself that provides the opportunity for the person’s need satisfaction. The donkey who wants to pull the wagon will pull the wagon[1]; the donkey who is not self-motivated to pull the wagon, won’t. You might be able to move the employee for a while with metaphorical carrots and sticks but in the long term the truly motivated employee will perform because of intrinsic factors.
Just as you cannot motivate another person, you can’t incentivise them either[2]. Bribing them with cheap tricks is ultimately manipulative and an insult to human dignity.
‘Incentivize’? – pshaw.
Doug Jordan, reporting to you from Kanata
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[1] I remember watching a contest of draft horses at a county fair trembling with excitement and then, when the starter bell rang, lunging and straining to pull a sledge loaded with 5000 lbs of concrete slabs. A woman spectator was alarmed that these horses were being forced to pull that slab but that was not the case: the sledge driver was not whipping the horses into a lather, they drove themselves.
[2] As much as I hate to admit it, incentives may actually work, but only in the short-term.
