I was at a meeting recently in which one of the participants said “If you want them to make the right choice, you need to give them an incentive.” There was nothing out of the ordinary about the comment. In fact, in the business school, it was completely ordinary if not expected.
Ask any MBA student how you get people to do what you want and you are likely to be told “incentivize” them. And if that doesn’t work? Well, you just didn’t use the right incentive.
No, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the comment, but it got me thinking “Have we become victims to incentives?” There is no doubt that incentives can play a role in whether or not we do something. Many of us would not do objectionable work if there wasn’t some sort of incentive (positive or negative) to encourage us.
When asked why managers make ethically or operationally questionable decisions, my MBA’s frequently point to the incentive system under which the managers were working – as if the managers had no choice. Such an answer, however, confuses encouragement (the intent of an incentive) with constraint. They talk as if the managers’ choices were completely and absolutely constrained by the incentives; they had no choice, they HAD to do what they did. In short, they were victims to the incentive system.
Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, points out in his TED talk on the loss of wisdom that our reliance on (and blame of?) incentives (and rules) may actually undermine our incentive for doing what is right, what we are passionate about, or what will make a difference for others. It seems to me that every time we blame incentives for why we do or don’t do something, we make ourselves more and more a victim to “them” and less and less responsible for our own actions.
Incentives are one form of information in a constellation of factors that contribute to our choices, but they are not THE cause of what we choose. That responsibility belongs to us.
