Organizational Culture and Leadership

EDUCAUSE announces a new EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) study, Leading the IT Workforce in Higher Education, by Phillip J. Goldstein. This 2008 ECAR research study builds on the work done in 2004 by ECAR in its original study of information technology leadership. The 2008 study addresses the following questions, among others:

Getting paid to do something you love can totally ruin the experience.

Odd, eh?

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many investigators think we have more than one motivational system, and these systems compete - activating one can knock out the other.

One study I've found focuses precisely on this phenomenon. It's called Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science (Vol15—Num11: 787-793). They were studying "homo economicus", and they wanted to see if adding compensation to a task would affect how much effort people put into a task. If humans are rational self-maximizers, they argued, then the more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words: