34 | The Lion King
Career Tips
What Managers don’t know
By Chinyere Agwuocha
W
hile reading through
a CIPD article, I came
across a striking head-
ing “the surprising truth about
what motivates us and the puz-
zle with motivation” by An Amer-
ican writer Daniel Pink. He has
written a whole lot on motivation
as I came to find out later. I had
never really been an advocate
of the “if-then” or contingency
rewards/punishments thing.
Hence, my interest grew to read
on and here’s what I found; “hu-
man beings are not as endlessly
manipulable and predictable as
you would think”!
Did you just say ‘I have heard
that before’? Here’s another
shocker, the traditional belief
that motivation drive lies in re-
wards and punishment has been
called to question. Again, the
carrot and stick model has failed
or made lighter; has flaws and
does not work all the time. This
simply means you don’t always
get more of the behaviours you
reward or less of those you pun-
ish. Why? It’s either we are em-
ploying Management By Com-
pliance (MBC) or Management
By Engagement (MBE) which is a
“truth science knows but man-
agers don’t” (Daniel Pink).
What managers know is likened
to Frederick Taylor’s 20th cen-
tury theory of motivation. The
theory held on the grounds that
employees engage in simple
uninteresting, routine and un-
challenging tasks and in highly
controlled environments and the
only way to get them to improve
performance was to incentivize
them properly through money
and monitor them closely (MBC).
Daniel Pink found that these
tasks characterized above
require ONLY mechanical skills
and perfectly achieves the ‘if-
then’ model where the carrot
and stick approach works flaw-
lessly. Consequently, manag-
ers get more of the behaviours
they reward and less of those
they punish; simple, logical and
justified. Put differently, higher
pay=better performance and
lower pay=poor performance.
Now, here’s what managers
don’t know. When the task re-
quires the least or minimum cog-
nitive skill as Daniel Pink found
out, strange things happen! The
if-then model fails and reveals
the flaws in the carrot and stick
approach. He arrived at this
conclusion following the find-
ings in the Federal Reserve Bank
sponsored research where par-
