Reward Power
The Basic Idea
Do you remember when your parents told you that if you did something you loved, you’d never work a day in your life? The famous saying is comforting in theory, however, most of us probably still feel like we engage in our work for more than just passion. Even if we enjoy it inherently, few people would agree to continue their responsibilities if their salary was taken away.
We are often motivated by reward; thoughts of recognition or compensation push us to work hard. Efficient leadership requires motivating employees to be productive and satisfied at work. One technique to achieve high levels of motivation is called reward power. Reward power is all about harnessing the power of incentives. Incentives can be tangible, such as bonuses, salary increases, promotions, and certificates, or intangible, such as praise and recognition.1
Reward power works through positive reinforcement. According to the behavioral perspective, we learn through our past experiences with stimuli. If producing a high quality of work has previously led to a reward, we come to associate that behavior with the reward and are more likely to repeat it in the future.
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
– American economist Steven Levitt in his book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
