Harvard Business Publishing

"No-no-I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence -- right here on the street, you know -- but if it was the back fence, I wouldn't mind, and she wouldn't. Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done."

So goes Mark Twain's famous story of Tom Sawyer's brilliant lure, escaping his chore while allowing the other boys in town to pay him for the privilege. Tom's inspiration tapped into the other lads' intrinsic motivation, or willingness to engage in an activity without some obvious external reward. It's a concept well worth thinking about as we design jobs for members of any generation, but particularly for today's youngest workforce entrants.

Those who grew up playing computer games have been suckled on the principles of intrinsic motivation. Back in 1981, Tom Malone of MIT defined a framework for designing successful (i.e., "addictive") computer games and effective online learning by carefully matching the player's growing skill level and the game's degree of difficulty, essentially encouraging gamers to achieve what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would later call "flow." Csikszentmihalyi's work shows that if a task is too hard or too easy for the individual relative to his or her skill level at any given time, there is no flow. There's just stress and anxiety if the work is too hard; only boredom if it is too easy.

Today most games are organized around increasing degrees of difficulties, with players motivated to move up the degrees as their own skill develops accordingly. Gamers constantly work toward the "welcome to the next level" signal which in itself serves as a powerful intrinsic motivator. Within this cultural norm, smaller steps are far better than big infrequent increments -- a useful guide to designing jobs for today's Gen Y's. As my friend Michael Carter, director of special projects at the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, points out, imagine the shock when a young gamer enters the workforce and learns that the increment to the next more difficult task is 12 months or more!

We seem to have an ambivalent view toward these principles. Are we encouraging people to be "engaged" or "in the flow" -- or are we creating addictive compulsions? Although Malone defined the principles over 25 years ago, and game designers today freely describe their goal as creating games that are "addictive," -- the broader world seems to be just now debating their merits. On July 10, 2007, National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, featured a heated discussion on whether video gaming was, in fact, addictive. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is not -- despite a game designer's explanation that they sure want it to be!

Addiction or not, the use of intrinsic principles to encourage self-motivated work activities can be enormously effective. Scientists are creating highly addictive computer games in which unsuspecting players are happily toiling at their own volition without pay on what would be seen as stupefyingly dull grunt work, if presented as an assigned task. Luis von Ahn, a 28-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon University is the creative force behind a Web hit known as the ESP Game, one of the first computer solitaire games in which the player is actually performing tasks that the computer can't do, in this case labeling images with keywords that can later be used by the computer to retrieve or categorize them.

It can be a highly successful strategy. In Tom Sawyer's case: "He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while -- plenty of company -- and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village."

How can you use intrinsic motivation in the design of tasks within your firm?

HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS:
Build a Motivated Workforce, 2nd Edition (HBR Article Collection)
Motivating People to Stay (HBR Article Collection)
The Kids Are Alright: How the Gamer Generation Is Changing the Workplace (Paperback)