For many years, the general consensus by many researchers and practitioners was that providing people with short-term extrinsic rewards sapped their long-term motivation. This led to some organizations reducing or not using short-term rewards at all. However, this perspective has always had some detractors and now even more research shows that this belief is misleading.

In this episode, Kurt and Tim explore the research paper by Indranil Goswami and Oleg Urmisky with the lovely title of “The Dynamic Effect of Incentives on Post-Reward Task Engagement” that shows that while short-term incentives drive an immediate reduction in task engagement, this only lasts for a short time and that engagement rebounds to the baseline relatively quickly.  

We examine some of the backstory to this belief, what the study showed, and review the implications of this.    

The Dynamic Effect of Incentives on Post-Reward Task Engagement: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312100138_The_dynamic_effect_of_incentives_on_postreward_task_engagement 

© 2022 Behavioral Grooves