Does Money Serve as an Effective Motivator for Certain Types of Work, But Not Others?

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Does money serve as a more effective motivator for certain types of work, but not others? That is the fundamental question explored by scholars in a recent working paper. Pamela Osborn Popp, Ben Newell, Daniel Bartels, and Todd Gureckis have written a paper titled, "Can Cognitive Discovery Be Incentivized With Money?" They conducted six experiments. In the first five experiments, they asked research subjects to examine a set of items. The participants had to determine how the items might be categorized sensibly into groups and then assign them appropriately. The scholars describe this task as "rule discovery" work. In the sixth experiment, the subjects engaged in "rule implementation" work. In that study, the scholars told the subjects what the categorization process should be, and the participants simply had to apply that criteria. 

The scholars found that money proved to be an effective motivator in the sixth experiment, but not in the previous five studies. The scholars conclude that tasks requiring creativity, insight, and discovery are quite cognitively challenging, and they depend on both attention and working memory.   They write  that "the results suggest that performance in tasks which require novel inductive insights are relatively immune to financial incentive, while tasks that require rote perseverance of a fixed strategy are more malleable."  

The researchers note that tasks in the workplace don't fall simply into these two categories though.  There's most likely a spectrum that stretches from the highly rote work to the extremely cognitively challenging tasks require high degrees of creativity.   Moreover, our work often involves some combination of these types of tasks.  Finally, the scholars remind us that this study focused strictly on one form of monetary incentive.  Non-monetary incentives may have different effects.