When Pay Ruins Everything

Virgin post... what a feeling of freedom, and irrelevance! Do the two go together, I wonder? Are the relevant always burdened?

Blogging is great! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. You see, I suffer from an illness. You might have it too! Basically, my problem is my attitude towards work. My work is important to me. I like working and I like producing good output. I want to exercise my talents, and I have various kinds of writing contracts on the go that let me do just that. Those projects are actually really quite interesting - producing texts and documents that seem like fun to put together.

However...

As soon as I do this thing I enjoy (writing) for money, the project takes on all the appeal of calculating my income taxes. I just can't get motivated to do it! Rather than doing that writing task I have agreed to do for money, I goof off, doing other writing tasks (like blogging) that I feel more like doing, just for fun.

Getting paid for something you love can totally ruin the experience.

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many different investigators believe that humans have more than one motivational system, and these systems may compete in various ways.

One of these distinctions is prominent in social exchange theory (SEC). SEC distinguishes between social exchange and economic exchange. Social exchanges ares based on trust, mutual aid, the joint production of public goods, social networking and social standing. Economic exchanges are based on contracts and on the profit principle. It may be the case that some of us are much more plugged in to the social motivational system than the economic one. Sexual selection may have had a role in shaping that social motivational system, making it more developed than it might otherwise have become... Googling "social exchange theory" opens the door to this little world.

Other people define two motivational systems differently, e.g. a "hot" (emotional) and "cool" (instrumental/rational) system, or an "approach" system and a "withdraw" system. People for whom money ruins the pleasures of work may be more hot/approach types, rather than cool/withdraw types. We may have an insufficient fear of poverty, perhaps. Or perhaps the systems overlap each other differently - we don't get hot for instrumental gains, but rather for social status and networking gains, or something.

Of course, a venerable distinction in the world of motivational studies is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Some of us may be so strong on the intrinsic motivation (e.g. high task-involvement and high control over our work) that extrinsic incentives actually ruin our motivation. In that case, managing people like us would involve surrounding us with the type of work we want to do anyway (which happens to be what our employers also want), and giving us enough money to feel important and respected (but not have that money connected to any specific task or project). Salary would be better than piecework, perhaps, for workers like us. Then we would need a social environment where we could distinguish ourselves, winning all of those social rewards (prominence, eminence, status, respect... etc.) which are the real things that motivate us...

This is exactly how the university system works, come to think of it! (Also possibly the entire country of France.)

It would be interesting to try to design or imagine a university-like company. Genetech apparently works this way: Employees don't get assignments, they get "appointments." ...Genentech awards sabbaticals to stave off burnout. To keep creativity alive, both it and Google encourage their scientists and engineers to spend fully 20% of each workweek pursuing pet projects.

Of course, blogging is pursuing a pet project, but for now I pursue it under the cloud of guilt. The shame, the shame...

I guess it's time to get back to work.