Notes on Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Incentives

Introduction: Motivation and Performance

  • Motivation is crucial for human performance and is a core focus in I/O psychology.
  • It affects healthcare, academics, and personal well-being.
  • Motivation can be intrinsic (enjoyment of the task itself) or extrinsic (incentives for gain or loss).
  • A more nuanced view includes a continuum of regulation types from external to internal (self-determination theory).

Research Questions

  • The study addresses three main questions:

    • Does intrinsic motivation predict performance?
    • What role do extrinsic incentives play?
    • Which is more important for performance: intrinsic motivation or extrinsic incentives?

Clarifying Key Definitions

  • Performance: Observable, achievement-related behavior with an evaluative component.

    • Examples: presentation quality (academics), goals scored (sports).

  • Incentives: Plans with predetermined criteria and standards for allocating rewards.

    • Include promotions, grades, praise, recognition, health benefits.
    • Motivating if attaining the incentive is instrumental toward something of value.

  • Extrinsic Incentives: External motivators contingent on achieving particular standards of behavior.

  • Intrinsic Motivation: Behaviors engaged in for their own sake, being inherently enjoyable and providing sufficient reason to persist.

Intrinsic Motivation and Performance

  • Providing financial incentives is associated with higher performance.

  • Intrinsically motivated behaviors are enjoyable and purposive.

  • There is a lack of meta-analysis on the intrinsic motivation-performance link.

    • It is undetermined if intrinsic motivation has the same predictive utility across different contexts.

  • The undermining effect posits that incentives reduce subsequent intrinsic motivation, but this debate obfuscates the importance of intrinsic motivation to performance.

  • Performance is determined both by intrinsic/extrinsic motvation and not one or the other. It's important to expand this line of research to tasks that are not fun, since that is present in various field settings.

  • Employees stated that the top motivation factor was "good wages" rather than "interesting work".

  • External limitations (budgets, deadlines, time) can be autonomy-supportive rather than autonomy-thwarting.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Intrinsic Motivation

  • SDT explains how intrinsic motivation fuels the:

    • Direction (task endorsement and participation)
    • Intensity (effort in task production)
    • Persistence of motivated behavior (engaging the task longer even without rewards)

Performance Type: Quality vs. Quantity

  • The strength of intrinsic motivation's influence hinges on performance definition.

  • Quality-type tasks require complexity, skill engagement, and personal investment.

    • They have a strong link to intrinsic motivation.

  • Quantity-type tasks are lower in complexity and require less cognitive investment.

    • They have a weaker link to intrinsic motivation and are produced by intensely focused, persisted, and structured behavior.

Incentive Contingency

  • The SDT incentive contingency includes engagement-, completion-, performance-, and non-contingent incentives.

  • For the current meta-analysis, incentive contingency is conceptualized by the degree to which the incentive is directly performance-salient or indirectly performance-salient.

  • Directly salient incentives have a clear, unambiguous link between incentive and performance.

  • Indirectly salient incentives have a less clear or direct link to performance.

Crowding Out Hypothesis

  • When incentives are directly performance-salient, they possess factors necessary for controlling behavior: immediacy and salience.
  • When direct incentives are present, there is a crowding-out of intrinsic motivation, in that incentives became the more salient factor to performance.
  • Indirectly performance-salient incentives lack salience and immediacy.
  • The influence on behavior is less potent; the importance of intrinsic motivation should rise.

Hypotheses

  • Hypothesis 1A: Intrinsic motivation is positively related to performance.
  • Hypothesis 1B: The relation between intrinsic motivation and performance is stronger for quality-type tasks than for quantity-type tasks.
  • Hypothesis 2A: Relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance (when incentivized) is strengthened by the presence of indirectly performance-salient incentives.
  • Hypothesis 2B: Relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance (when incentivized) is weakened by the presence of directly performance-salient incentives.

Relative Importance of Incentives and Intrinsic Motivation

  • Extrinsic incentives have been argued to explain the dominant share of variability in performance.
  • The proximal salience of intrinsic motivation to performance is increasingly recognized.
  • For quantity criteria, incentives should be the dominant predictor.
  • For quality criteria, intrinsic motivation should be more important.

Hypotheses (cont.)

  • Hypothesis 3A: Considered concurrently in the prediction of performance quantity, extrinsic incentives are a better predictor than intrinsic motivation.
  • Hypothesis 3B: Considered concurrently in the prediction of performance quality, intrinsic motivation is a better predictor than extrinsic incentives.

Method

  • Literature Search:

    • Extensive search of databases.
    • Call for unpublished research.

  • Criteria for Inclusion:

    • Reported effect size for the relation between intrinsic motivation and performance.
    • Provided a defensible measure of both intrinsic motivation and performance.

  • Coding Data:

    • A coding schema was set up in advance, and every data point was coded independently by the first two authors and cross-verified.

    • Initial coding agreement = 81.89%

Operationalization of Intrinsic Motivation

  • Autonomous regulation, intrinsic motivation, task enjoyment/satisfaction, free-choice task persistence were collapsed given a dichotomy provides a way to think about the moderating impact of incentives on the IM-performance relationship.

Performance Categories

  • Quality: Output compared with some evaluative performance standard (e.g., creativity, assembly quality).
  • Quantity: Performance evaluated by counting discrete units of output (e.g., number of points, number of errors).
  • Both: Criteria with elements of both quality and quantity (e.g., academic performance).

Extrinsic Incentives

  • Coded broadly as present when there was any prize, credit, or financial compensation surrounding task performance and as absent when the study explicitly stated that none was expected or offered.
  • Incentives were further divided by incentive contingency using incentive salience.

Data Analysis

  • Meta-analytic methods using random-effects model.

    • Hunter and Schmidt method uses a random-effects model.
    • (a) study artifacts and (b) potential moderators.

  • Employed matrix regression

  • Pioneered a new method to answer post hoc questions by rescaled characteristics using simple dummy coding

Results

  • 2,903 non-duplicated unique original articles, and 154 sources selected for inclusion

  • Hypothesis 1A, 1B, 2A, and 2B, 3A, and 3B were all supported

Discussion

  • Findings demonstrate the joint and relative contribution of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives to performance.

  • The population-level relation between intrinsic motivation and performance is positive across all moderators examined.

  • The salience of performance incentives would increase or decrease this link.

    • When extrinsic incentives were present but indirectly salient to performance - intrinsic motivation was a better predictor of performance.

Compensation Strategies

  • There has been an inability to reconcile three seemingly true, but incompatible premises: (a) incentives boost performance, (b) intrinsic motivation boosts performance, and (c) incentives reduce intrinsic motivation.

  • Unlocking POMP Method: the mean scores of each were converted to percentage of maximum possible (POMP) score for each study

  • The ongoing debate surrounding the undermining effect, the findings are mostly in line with Deci et al.’s (1999) meta-analysis, In short, our findings are mostly in line with Deci et al.’s (1999) meta-analysis.

    • Incentives alone have little omnibus impact on intrinsic motivation (r .06).

Implications for Practice

  • Certain demographic information showed with respect to levels of intrinsic motivation shows there is a strong relationship with age increases with age (r .42)
  • Our findings reinforce