What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#51

Post by a_c_s » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 9:51 PM UTC

ktom wrote: post #43

rhizome wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your employees are simply mediocre performers? What if there was something that could motivate them to get better?

I would suggest that the best performers are internally motivated and not externally motivated. So ultimately if you could motivate them to be better, then by definition they would be mediocre performers. Based on my personal experience, I would not be surprised if you were to show me a study that found a strong correlation between being internally motivated and being considered a star performer.

You are assuming people who are 'high achievers' achieve highly in all circumstances: this is false.

For example, the Ivy League colleges suffer rampant grade inflation due to these high-achieving students not being able to cope with getting less-than-perfect grades. This poor coping is a form of 'low achievement' that drives other 'low achievement' behaviors: reduced course load, dropping out, switching to less rigorous majors, etc.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#52

Post by VeejayRampay » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 9:52 PM UTC

Sorry to be so negative but what a moronic article.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#53

Post by dgabriel » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 11:37 PM UTC

benjohnson wrote: post #11

It really depends on the the employee. Some thrive on open-ended projects, some thrive with bite-sized chunks of work with quick feedback. For me, as an employer, I tend to go look at their car. If it's a mess inside, then I tend to lump them in the "needs quick feedback" category.

That's brilliant.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#54

Post by etler » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 11:53 PM UTC

chrisdotcode wrote: post #31

pestaa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I would have been brave enough to give admin permissions to authors of disappointing pull requests. Well done. If you recall who he is, let us know.

This was Felixge - former core Node.js developer - with his pull request hack [0]. [0] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

Thanks for finding that!

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#55

Post by teeja » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 8:12 AM UTC

The end of the article says, "If you're looking for a job, any job, try North Dakota." The article that links to blames the great ND economy on oil. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-geog...

Energy's partly responsible. But there's a more important reason that NoDak didn't suffer at all during the recession: its publicly-owned State Bank. It remained sane and stable and crime-free while those traits were rare in the other 49 states. Check it.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#56

Post by ArekDymalski » Wed, Aug 28, 2013, 11:37 AM UTC

I find it ridiculous that in 21st century people still hope that there will be one, easy-to-implement (and preferably instantly working and cheap as well) answer to this question. There are several (at least 20) different (de)motivators and each of us have his own configuration of them. But we still have to listen to the stick or carrot debate. Sigh....