Expectations change how the same experience feels.
More quotesGive a child a prize for drawing and you may get more drawing today plus less interest tomorrow. An incentive can increase the behaviour while quietly changing what the behaviour means. Before the prize, the felt-tip pens are play. Afterwards, they are the unpleasant machinery required to obtain a certificate. Remove the certificate and the newly supplied reason disappears. Congratulations: motivation has been successfully purchased and then made unemployed.
Targets create adult versions of the same trick. Reward every submitted idea and people learn that quantity is the actual job. Pay for each completed page and reading becomes a race against comprehension. Add points to voluntary help and generosity begins to resemble a badly paid shift. This is not an argument against wages, prizes or recognition. Repetitive labour deserves compensation. Unexpected thanks can confirm that effort mattered. A temporary reward can help somebody begin an action whose benefit arrives slowly.
The question nobody likes asking is what story the incentive tells. Are we paying because the work is valuable, because progress deserves recognition, or because no sane person would otherwise tolerate the task? Participants draw conclusions from the payment as surely as they draw them from the activity.
The period after the reward reveals the answer. Does quality collapse? Do people continue voluntarily? Did they discover competence or merely learn the exchange rate?
An incentive programme can report a glorious rise in activity and still have damaged the thing it counts. That is the sort of success organisations are surprisingly good at rewarding.