Reinforcements are consequences that increase a behaviour in the future.

A reward given after a desired behaviour, for example, is a reinforcement.

There are two types of reinforcement:

• Positive reinforcement: when, after a desired behaviour, a desirable consequence is presented. For example, a reward given after a desired behaviour is manifested.
• Negative reinforcement: when, after a desired behaviour, an unpleasant consequence is removed. For example, a child doesn’t have to tidy up their room (unpleasant activity) after studying and getting a good score at school (desired behaviour).

Punishments are consequences that decrease a behaviour in the future.

In the book Drive and in the course Inspiring and Motivating individuals are reported various suggestions related to the best practices to reward people. The best practices are based on what the researches in that field say.

The best practices are:

• If the work to be done is a routine:
  • ask yourself if it can be made more varied and connect the work to a purpose.
    • If yes give occasional unexpected rewards and praise people.
    • If not, give rewards but explain the scope of the work. Recognise that the task is boring and leave people the decision about how to do it.
• If the work to be done is not a routine, give occasional unexpected rewards and focus on satisfying autonomy, competence and purpose of the task.
• Rewards must be unexpected, otherwise they become ineffective.
• Rewards must be given only after the completion of the task.
• Payments should be sufficient in order to put the money out of the motivation bench.
• People with similar responsibilities should have similar wages.
• Similar jobs should be have wages similar to other companies.
• Pay a little more than the standard for that job.
• If there are factors that influence payments, they should be important and a little difficult to be reached.
• Rewards must be aligned to the desired behaviours.
• Rewards must be aligned to the person’s needs and values.
• The timing and frequency of the reward is important and should be variable otherwise it become expected.

Intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic motivation. However, in organisation extrinsic motivation through payment rewards are often necessary to motivate people. This because organisation sometimes have goals that do not always fit people goals and therefore payment rewards are a way to maintain people motivated. The risk of using only this kind of rewarding system is that if people find other organisation where payment rewards are higher, they likely change organisation.

Develop competence and clarify values are essential factors to motivate a group of people to reach a common goal.

There are other important factors like autonomy and relatedness that help to gain motivation. However I think that developing competence and clarifying values are essential not only to motivate people but also to gain coordination of their actions to reach the goal.

With coordination I mean that people agree about the way to reach the goal and act accordingly.

In the book Drive, and also in other resources about leadership and motivation, is reported that it is important to create a vision in order to motivate and lead a group of people but also themselves.

It is however important to balance vision and execution because as a Japanese proverb tells:

Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare.

The vision should give us the direction and the motivation necessary to overcome the resistance that block our action at the beginning of a difficult endeavour.

Here below I report some strategies to increase relatedness that I found in the book Drive:

• Doing things that are useful to a group in order to feel to belong to something greater than themselves.
• Finding the purpose of what we do.

It is important that the group share the same values and that we feel that the other people of the group would help us in case of needs despite the difficulty.

Here below I report some strategies to increase autonomy that I found mainly in the book Drive:

• Leave people the freedom to choose on what, when, how and with who work. The important is to complete the work required. I have some concerns about this statement. See Balance autonomy and accountability.
• Leave free the 20% of time to work on projects decided by people. I have some concerns also about this strategy.
  • Although this is surely a strategy that increase autonomy and motivation, I have some doubts about the efficiency of this suggestion in terms of productivity. If this would be efficient, it means that the project decided by people have a higher return of investment than the project decided by the company. If this is true, why the company do not decide to work on them for more than the 20% of time? Because the people who decide do not understand what it valuable and what it is not? I think this strategy is valid in particular in context where creativity and innovation is a main part of the job. It is also true that many self-directed projects may lead to valuable long-term outcomes, but companies still need to balance short-term business goals with long-term innovation.
  • Another concern is that, to be efficient, the motivation increased allowing people to work on free projects it is worth more than 20% of people time. It seems to me a huge increase, that would mean that most of the unmotivated people are very inefficient and probably not very professional.
  • To conclude I agree that this is a strategy to increase autonomy and motivation, but I have some concerns about the efficiency to define a fixed amount of time (20%). It should depend on various factors and the context.

In conclusion I believe that the strategies should be flexible and adaptive to the context.