Dan Pink says: Incentives will slow down business performance, the science knows, but business ignores
Dan’s point is that rewarding performance mostly doesn’t work and often leads to worse performance. For tasks that are simple and straight-forward and require no creativity or cognitive skills, extrinsic motivation works fine and promising people rewards for good performance increases performance. But as soon as a task requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, performance decreases if you offer performance rewards. And the larger the reward, the worse the performance.
