Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: An anecdote

A long long time ago in a totally hypothetical company that still exists but only in name, there was a little bit of discontent¹. You see, one of the core values of the company was its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Rather than lowering the bar, like how some people think inclusion works, they had many outreach programs that encouraged women and minorities to take up STEM. These outreach programs almost necessarily fell on the shoulders of the women and minorities who were already employed at the company – after all representation matters. Those who worked on these did so out of their own passion. They wanted to help others like them.

Anyone who has worked in tech will tell you it’s a lot of work. This company’s performance review system attempted to measure the amount and quality of said work so that they can reward the right people for the right reasons. Since the company deemed that having a diverse workforce was in their best interest, ideally they would reward people working towards that goal. However, the performance review system didn’t measure anything about volunteer work like what the people doing outreach were doing.

So those volunteers were unhappy. All that extra work, often done at the expense of work that is measured in the performance review system, didn’t count for anything when career progress was concerned. They wanted change.

The company listened.

“Community contributions” got added to the job descriptions for people at all levels. Naturally the higher the level, the broader in scope those contributions were required to be. It was now part of everyone’s job to make contributions that made the company’s culture better – be it recruitment, outreach, or whatever.

The changes to the performance review system was an improvement. But unintentionally it had other side-effects. Notably, those higher up the organizational ladder found that their community contributions need to be commesurate with their status. But starting up an effort that is at the company or region level was a lot of work. Lucky for them, those volunteers who were passionate about helping others had already established programs that were of the right scale.

So as career focused people are wont to do, they threw their weight around and effectively took over these outreach programs. The volunteers were upset. Some left. Others kept working but at a smaller capacity than what they were before. The career focused people were happy, but the volunteers were not.

The outreach programs still existed² but were run by people who were no longer doing it just to help other people. They were run by people who were trying to help themselves. The programs faltered; quality went down; the effectiveness of the programs went downhill. It wasn’t fun or rewarding as it was before.