Career Focus

This course gives students frameworks and tools for (i) understanding what motivates people, including themselves, and (ii) designing incentive systems, broadly defined, that motivate both individual performance and organizational behavior. Students will learn to apply these concepts to enhance their own productivity while also developing skills to motivate others toward value-creating purposes. The course is useful for students in all career tracks and with any industry focus as it covers diverse cases across sectors, including but not limited to investment banking, law, consulting, technology, non-profit organizations, the automotive industry, and professional sports. The cases also span the organizational hierarchy, examining motivation challenges from frontline worker engagement to executive compensation, providing students with a comprehensive toolkit applicable across different organizational roles and at any career stage.

Educational Objectives

By the end of the course, students will:

• Understand the wide range of motivational factors that drive human behavior in an organizational context, including pay, perquisites, promotions, opportunities for skill development, social approval, fairness, stress, emotional states, autonomy, self-identity, and values
• Apply motivational principles to enhance their own productivity and effectiveness
• Have the skills to build and manage effective incentive systems, whether based on monetary compensation or based on other forms of rewards, that tap into people's underlying motivations and promote value-creating behavior
• Understand how an organization's incentive systems shape the mix of individuals who are attracted to, promoted within, and retained by the organization
• Know how to design organizational processes, such as hiring procedures and training programs, in ways that complement the organization's formal incentive systems
• Have the skills to evaluate and use digital tools and technologies (like AI and personal productivity trackers) to enhance personal productivity and employee motivation

Course Content and Organization

The course takes an interdisciplinary perspective and draws from behavioral science, the field that combines insights from economics and psychology to understand human decision making.

In order to establish a baseline from which the rest of the course builds, Module 1 explores the classical economic approach to analyzing both personal productivity and organizational incentive systems. Using an extremely simple view of motivation, the economic approach provides many useful insights for getting things done. The key observation is that it is impossible to perfectly measure and therefore impossible to directly reward the value that is created by an individual on behalf of an organization or themselves. When contending with this challenge, the designer of an incentive system—or someone trying to motivate themselves—faces an important tradeoff between inducing high levels of motivation and inducing the right types of behavior. All incentive systems represent different strategies for managing this tradeoff.

Module 2 challenges and expands the classical economic approach by considering a much richer perspective on what motivates people. Relying primarily on a psychological lens, this module examines how both personal motivational strategies and organizational incentive systems should account for the relevance of non-monetary rewards, the social nature of the workplace, the emotions experienced in a work environment, and the role of meaning and purpose in shaping motivation. Students will explore how these psychological factors affect their own productivity habits and decision-making processes, and how these factors can cause well-intentioned organizational incentive systems to backfire. Simultaneously, these psychological insights represent an opportunity for a skilled individual to harness a powerful set of motivators for getting things done, whether for motivating themselves or for motivating others.

Module 3 synthesizes ideas from earlier in the course and embeds them in the broader context of personal effectiveness and an organization's overall strategy and operations. The module will analyze the interaction of formal incentive systems with other organizational processes and self-motivation techniques that may undermine or reinforce value creating behavior. Special attention will be given to motivation challenges in remote and hybrid work environments, addressing how traditional motivation approaches must adapt to these increasingly common settings. Finally, students will have the opportunity to reflect on how their own personal values should interface with their approach when designing incentive systems to shape others' behavior and when developing strategies to motivate themselves.

Group Project and Evaluation

Students will work in groups of four or five to prepare a presentation on a frontier topic in the broad area of motivation—both self-motivation and organizational approaches. Examples: students might present a "mini-case" on a company that uses innovative incentive practices or personal productivity systems; students might report the results of a laboratory-style experiment exploring a novel source of motivation; or students might share a synthesis of lessons learned from a handful of interviews conducted with interesting thinkers in the field of motivation.

Students will be encouraged to incorporate both academic research findings and practical industry applications in their presentations, bridging theory and practice. The instructors will suggest a number of pre-approved topics from which students can choose, and students can also propose their own topics (subject to instructor approval and enough interest from other students to form a group). This project is not meant to be a full-fledged final course assignment, but instead a lighter-touch opportunity to explore an interesting idea in line with the course framework.

The components of the overall course grade are as follows: 50% based on class participation, 10% based on the group project, and 40% based on an exam at the end of the semester.

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