HOW MUCH DOES MONEY REALLY MOTIVATE US TO WORK?
When originally starting this article, I was originally going to pose the question as to whether or not money actually motivates work in the first place.
Well, of course it does.
You aren’t choosing out of the goodness of your heart to spend a third of your day five days a week for years on end doing a job, especially a job that you hate in the case of many people. At best, a job would not be a practical use of your time if you didn’t get paid to do it — living has expenses.
That said, in lies a different question.
We may consider money as being the primary factor to working. Is it, though?
When I was in college, I spent my summers temping at industrial warehouses assembling and packing things. For eight hours a day, I did one task — it was mind-numbing, to say the least. The only thing that could have kept me going during that time was the fact that I was at least going to get a paycheck out of it. Besides that, it affected my mental health.
However, we’re also living in a world of gig economists, freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs — people whose work does not necessarily provide a living wage. These people have to be driven almost entirely out of passion for what they do, with the knowledge that they won’t always see a profit.
Why does money motivate one job more than another? One explanation is that one job is driven out of extrinsic motivation — money — and another is driven out of intrinsic motivation — a great idea, a bigger picture, a day filled with more interesting tasks.
There have been many studies conducted on this topic that all generally reveal the same thing: money is a motivational factor, but it’s relatively weak. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, studies are finding that employee engagement is only loosely correlated to pay level no matter the salary. While that’s not to say that money isn’t a motivating factor at all, a psychological study led by Edward Deci finds that “expected tangible rewards made contingent upon doing, completing, or excelling at an interesting activity undermine intrinsic motivation for that activity” (pg 632). Put another way, for interesting tasks particularly, intrinsic motivation declines when extrinsic motivation rises.
This same study, however, looked at the opposite case being true in which “rewards [undermine] intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks but [maintain or enhance] intrinsic motivation for boring tasks” (pg 650). Noted in my example above, I had more extrinsic motivation for a job where I had very little intrinsic motivation.
Likewise, someone like a freelance artist whose primary goal is to get a business running is going to stay more motivated by intrinsic measures when extrinsic measures are absent. That said, once she starts earning money from her business, the intrinsic motivation starts to dwindle as extrinsic motivation becomes more tangible. It’s not to say that her passion ever goes away — but once it’s measured, it changes from, “I want to make all of this beautiful, awesome art for my business” to “I need to make 40 pieces of new artwork if I’m going to make a profit this quarter.”
So, to summarize, money is a weak motivating factor. We still need a living wage, which is why an ice cream parlor experienced a flood of applicants when they rose the wage from $7.25 to $15.00. Jobs need a basic extrinsic incentive to keep people. Still, the best way to stay engaged at a job is to give people interesting things to do.
It’s hard to care about what’s in our bank account when we spend our lives doing a mind-numbing, soul-crushing job.
