What motivates you to do your best work?

Does anyone around you understand that?

Daniel H. Pink thinks he knows the answer to the first question.  And his answer to the second question is no.

In DRiVE: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books, 2009), Pink says most employers and educators use the “carrot-and-stick” approach.    Promise a reward or threaten punishment and people will do their best. 

Really?

This author says not really.  Using evidence from both social science experiments and contemporary workplace environments, Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic motivation often keeps people from doing their best.  Some of today’s most successful companies find ways to allow employees to work from instrinsic motivation. 

This is the “Type I” motivation that the word “DRiVE” on the cover subtly suggests.  Google, for example, encourages its engineers to spend one day a week (20% of the work week) on a project of their own choosing.  Some of the company’s best innovations (Google News and Gmail, for example) emerged from this self-directed creative energy.

The ingredients of motivation, Pink says, are autonomy (giving people independence), mastery (desiring to command or grasp a subject or effort), and purpose (focusing on the intended result).

I am not a business owner or manager, although I do oversee about 25 employees.  In many ways, I do tend to operate instinctively by giving employees autonomy.  Pink also suggests annual evaluations and employee goals should emerge from the employees themselves.  This is how we do it at Corinth.

But my broader interest in the book is pastoral and biblical.  Does the book fit a Christian world view?  Yes and no.

The Bible’s view of human nature is not exactly that if we are left to our own devices, we will all do our best.  From a theological perspective, Pink’s book doesn’t take into account the sin nature.  Some of the Bible’s motivation is clearly extrinsic – rewards in heaven vs. punishment in hell.  The ultimate carrot and stick.

When we deal with motivating people, we have to take into account all the ways that the sin nature affects people.  People do need boundaries, rules, structure, and tangible results – positive or negative.

But here’s where I think Daniel Pink makes a lot of sense.  God himself displays an amazing level of determination and endurance in terms of motivating humans.  Although carrots and sticks and abound in the Bible, for the most part, God stays out of humanity’s way as we try to figure life out.  He’s given us all the guidance we need in his Word.  But the rewards for obeying and the punishments for ignoring God are hardly immediate and obvious.  It’s almost as if God is saying, “I’ll give you time and space.  See if you can figure it out.”

Any subject related to why humans do what they do is never simple.  In terms of what happens in the workplace, school, or even church, some balance of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation will always be necessary.

But Daniel Pink is on to something when he says we have focused too long and too much on trying to make people do what we want.  In theological language, that probably comes from our own sin nature – the need to control others because we’re trying to be their God.