“Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.
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Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one. That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.
This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.
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... if you take people who love something (after all, the students who took part in this experiment signed up for an experiment to build Legos) and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.
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If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.
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Division of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees’ sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. Highly divisible labor might be efficient if people were automatons, but, given the importance of internal motivation and meaning to our drive and productivity, this approach might backfire. In the absence of meaning, knowledge workers may feel like Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times, pulled through the gears and cogs of a machine in a factory, and as a consequence they have little desire to put their heart and soul into their labor.
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If we look at the labor market through this lens, it is easy to see the multiple ways in which companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees. Just think about your own workplace for a minute, and I am sure you will be able to come up with more than a few examples.
This can be a rather depressing perspective, but there is also space for optimism. Since work is a central part of our lives, it’s only natural for people to want to find meaning—even the simplest and smallest kind—in it. The findings of the Legos and the letter-pairs experiments point to real opportunities for increasing motivation and to the dangers of crushing the feeling of contribution. If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning—not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.
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ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn. Among adult Americans, “What do you do?” has become as common a component of an introduction as the anachronistic “How do you do?” once was—suggesting that our jobs are an integral part of our identity, not merely a way to make money in order to keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. It seems that many people find pride and meaning in their jobs.
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The need to complete goals runs deep in human nature—perhaps just as deep as in fish, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, and parrots playing with SeekaTreats.
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In the end, our results show that even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way. Ultimately, managers (as well as spouses, teachers, and parents) may not need to increase meaning at work as much as ensure that they don’t sabotage the process of labor. Perhaps the words of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, to “make a habit of two things—to help, or at least do no harm” are as important in the workplace as they are in medicine.
