Recognise This! – Employee recognition and rewards, properly applied, are not detrimental to intrinsic motivation.

There’s a lot of research circulating on employee recognition, reward, motivation, inspiration, etc. Out of this research comes one question I hear often, “Don’t rewards cause employees to lose intrinsic motivation for their work?”

A careful examination of the research proves this to be untrue. One such report looked at the last 25 years of research on this topic, drawing the conclusion: “Our analysis of a quarter century of accumulated research provides little evidence that reward reduces intrinsic task interest.”

Of course, there are caveats in when and how rewards are used. Read my post on Compensation Cafe for the details.