Read an interesting article in The Observer on Sunday. Apparently during the Battle of Britain German fighter pilots were paid a bonus for every Spitfire and Hurricane they shot down. If the management maxim that compensation drives behaviour is to be believed it should have been a resounding success but it wasn’t. They forgot that their role was to protect the bombers not to chasing around after the British fighters, but more importantly they over estimated the number of aircraft they shot down so thereby changing the way the commanders directed the battle. This approach to compensation is still used today as a way to motivate employees but there is almost no evidence to suggest that it actually works, on the contrary much of the research carried out suggests it is counterproductive. So why do organisations still do it? Well there’s no denying that it has an effect and for most managers this is enough as gives them illusion that they are achieving something, but the reality is that managing people by bribes is a crude and corrosive way to run an organisation. Written in 1968 Frederick Herzberg’s Harvard Business Review article, One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees points out that satisfaction and dissatisfaction with a job are not as you would suspect two sides of the same coin. Herzberg argues that the opposite of dissatisfaction with a job is no job dissatisfaction. Money, like work conditions, relations with peers, status and, above all, company policy and supervision, were what he called 'hygiene factors' - aspects external to the job that could make people unhappy if they were inadequate, but which weren't motivational. Motivators, on the other hand, were factors intrinsic to the job: achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement and personal growth. It follows from this that most motivational tools, from exhortation to pay incentives, are useless: people can only motivate themselves. As Herzberg famously wrote: 'If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.'