The best way to incentivize people at work has been a topic of debate for many years, but the issue still seems to rumble on, despite an apparent consensus that intrinsic motivation is typically far better than extrinsic. Research from Harvard Business School explores the matter in the context of innovation, and examines how we can best encourage it at work.

The researchers used GitHub as their Petri dish after the platform introduced a scheme to sponsor coders. The scheme was introduced in 2019 and initially seemed to boost innovation, with those eligible for matching funds tending to perform better in the period up to their payout than their non-participatory peers.

Once those people had been paid, however, both their performance and their general engagement declined. The researchers suggest that, as with previous studies, the very act of being paid reduced any intrinsic motivation people got from their tasks.

Too much like work

Indeed, users reported that when they started to get paid, the task immediately started to feel like work, with accountability for outcomes that drained the joy from a task that was primarily signed up for because it was fun.

The researchers believe that their findings should be demonstrative for any crowd-based endeavor, where there is usually a strong intrinsic motivation for participating. Nowhere is this more so than with open source software, where users typically join to help the crowd and to gain access to the fruits of their collective labor.

With so much of the modern world powered by open source software, there has been an understandable interest in trying to encourage people to participate in such projects. After analyzing over 100,000 GitHub users, however, the findings should suggest caution is best applied before deploying financial incentives.

“This is like any other incentive program and organization when they roll them out,” the authors explain. “Even if they’re well-intended and people think they’re going to work, there has to be some way of testing them to see if they actually achieve what the intention was.”

Beyond money

The findings demonstrate that there are often things that money can’t buy, and in the open source world, this is often being part of a larger community and the reputation one manages to construct within that community.

“If you have a strong culture and community, you can get so much more out of your people,” the researchers conclude. “Then, you may not need these other really high-powered incentives—if there’s commitment to actually helping others and producing things for everyone else.”

Obviously the open source world has been able to cultivate it’s culture and community over several decades, so is not easily replicable in other workplaces, but the findings are nonetheless food for thought when it comes to incentivizing innovation and creativity at work.