The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is one of New York Times best-selling books, written by Daniel H. Pink and first published by Riverside Books in the year 2009. The book is a non-fictional and a motivational one with the theme of motivation evident in all the chapters. Daniel Pink is well known due to his excellent writing skills in non-fictional books that cover business skills as well as management. Other books he has written include To Sell is Human, A Whole New Mind, and Adventures of Johnny Bunko. He has a degree in Arts and a law degree from Yale; additionally, his skills in writing motivational books can be attributed to the experience he got as a business columnist with several of his articles featured in The New York times.
Pink’s book The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is very popular and has been translated into several languages. The reason behind writing this book comes from the rigidity in the legal profession that he found after graduating from the law school; he observed that there were no freedom, motivation, and incentives in that business making him not to practice it as he felt limited (TED, 2016). The book addresses and tries to prove how viewing motivation as an aspect that has to come along with financial rewards is a wrong approach. For him, motivation can be due to extrinsic or intrinsic elements. For a natural form of motivation, he categorizes it into autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
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The genre of the book is non-fictional, and this is evidenced by Pink’s frequent use of real life experiences. Pink uses instances of Wikipedia and Firefox companies that take good advantage of the open source design to attract volunteers who are assumed to have a self-drive for work as opposed to using of employees who might not be intrinsically motivated to work (Pink, 2012). The examples are used to emphasize the importance of internal motivation in the practical world. Pink gives a general overview of the scenario, behaviors, and attitudes in the real life set-up.
The content in the book is categorized into three broad parts namely, A New Operating System, The Three Elements, and The Type I Toolkit with each having a few chapters (Pink, 2012). In the first part, The New Operating System, there are three sections namely, The Rise and fall of motivation, seven reasons carrots and sticks (often) don’t work and Type I and X.
In the first chapter, the rise and fall of motivation, Pink talks about the operating system of motivation. He states that motivation has transitioned from the survival approach where, to increase labor one had to reward or punish employees, to the obvious approach of using intrinsic incentives like giving employees more freedom at work (Pink, 2012). In the past people would be motivated through rewards and punishment that were used an excellent tool to either scare people or give the morale to work hard. However, companies have discovered that the approach is not as efficient and have moved to the intrinsic form of motivation which comes more from the individual’s self-drive due to being treated fairly and given freedom to explore and innovate.
The reasons why carrots and sticks do not work mean the reasons why financial incentives are inefficient in a working environment. Pinks states that, “ financial incentives reduce the self-driven form of motivation, lowers the firm’s productivity when eliminated, becomes addictive, promotes limited thinking, encourages unethical behavior, and discourages creativity plus good behavior” (Pink, 2012). Motivating employees through financial incentives is short term and a very ineffective way since the employees will only give a real output in situations where they get the profit if the finances are eliminated they employees fail to be motivated to work hard. For the high-income earners, financial incentives do not make a significant impact on them and intrinsic motivation would be the most efficient method.
The unique cases when external forms of motivation like financial rewards work are in situations where the job is redundant and boring; so as to make the obvious incentive effective, employees should be given the liberty to explore ways to execute the task (Pink, 2012). When a job is not unusual, use of financial incentives to motivate can work provided that the wages and salaries of the employees are already within an acceptable range. The financial incentives will remove negative attitude concerning the task and make employees work faster and more efficient.
There exist two types of behaviors, the type X where people work if they are coerced to do so due to extrinsic initiatives like money, while the type I are the self-driven individuals who view the work environment as fun and conducive (Pink, 2012). However, the type I behavior is a long-term form of motivation and hence leads to the growth of the operating system belonging to motivation.
One of the elements of the internal form of motivation is autonomy. This is the ability or the freedom of the employee to control ways to implement an assignment, decide on the time to do it and the specific task to do; hence, an employer who gives the employees autonomy will witness an upsurge in productivity as employees perform way beyond their abilities (Pink, 2012). However, Pink assumes that all individuals have a personality of working well under minimum supervision. In many cases especially the production plants with a large number of employees that have different cultural and academic backgrounds, liberty to perform tasks easily lead to chaos as a good number of the people do not possess self-management skills and the lack of co-ordination quickly causes the efficiency and productivity of the firm to be lowered. Autonomy will work well for a small group that is aligned more towards Internet technology and have many different effective ways of implementing a particular task.
Pink acknowledges that intrinsic motivation can be nurtured through mastery. Mastery, which is the quest for being perfect in a task starts when one is faced with challenges that require the intensive application of one’s skills and abilities (Pink, 2012). With time, the exposure to similar challenging tasks makes one master the criteria to accomplish them, therefore, in the long run; the individual is motivated due to an intrinsic factor.
The third factor that contributes to intrinsic motivation is the purpose. Pink argues out that individuals will have a self-drive to work if they know and get to appreciate the purpose of performing their task (Pink, 2012). However, the approach is only applicable for individuals who are in vocational careers that specialize in delivering services to save lives, doctors and nurses know the purpose of their work is to provide quality health care to save people’s lives. However in workplaces that have little connection with service delivery and the tasks are not a matter of life and death, the purpose might not offer a good form of internal motivation. Pink should have been specific on which scenario applies to the different types of motivation; he is quite general in the way he argues the point.
The narrating writing style used by Pink is quite useful to some extent especially in explaining how and why intrinsic motivation is necessary; his voice is also very convincing. However, the use of narration method throughout the entire book without incorporation of other characters makes one get bored. At some point, the discussion is redundant, and there are no aspects of humor, vivid description, symbolism, suspense, and metaphors which usually make the reader be indulged and sail with the author into the world of imagination.
The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is a fascinating and inspirational read that can motivate and give good advice to entirely everyone. However, the author would have been more convincing by giving statistics on the effectiveness of the three factors that cultivate internal motivation. Additionally, the author should have been more specific on all the factors that affect motivation by stating which applies to the different professions and which ones do not.
References
Article Bio. (2016) . Daniel H. Pink. articlebio.com. Retrieved from http://articlebio.com/daniel-h-pink
Pink, D. H. (2012). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us . New York: Riverhead Books.
TED. (2016). Dan Pink on Motivation. Ted.com . Retrieved from ttps://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/transcript?language=en
