M.M. I see that your findings can be applied in many fields. For example,
how we behave in a company that uses monetary incentives for their
employees?
G.C.
This is interesting, what
you say, Mado, because
there is some research
that looks into the possibility that monetary
incentives may actually
reduce the effort that
workers put into whatever the firm’s objective
is, so the experiment
was not designed to test
this sort of hypothesis
but there is some work
which shows that sometimes monetary incentives in company work
environments actually go in the opposite
direction because they
displace intrinsic incentives. For instance, if
I’m a baker, I’m allowed
to do it because I like to
make bread. Or if I am
a doctor, I like to help
38
people with my medical
skills. Sometimes providing additional incentives to the monetary
need removes these
intrinsic incentives, so
our training does not
address that there are
other interpretations
and other consequences for organizations or
work within a firm.
For example if in teamwork is very difficult to
organize around cooperative norms, perhaps
it is because the team is
far apart in the world or
team members cannot
exactly understand what
each other are doing so
there’s a contradiction
to output. There may
be monetary incentives