This seems valid as far as it goes, but there are common situations where dominance/accountability as a motivation strategy starts to fall apart. I’m thinking mainly of some types of white-collar knowledge work (at a fairly high level) where it’s not easy to tell how hard or effectively someone is working from the outside. Maybe somebody with more management experience can comment on this, but my impression is: As a manager, you want to avoid micromanaging, both because you don’t have the time or expertise for it and because it pisses people off. I think it’s much easier, and maybe more reliable, to try to hire people with “internal motivation” than to try to motivate them via dominance. Dominance as a motivator very easily turns into fear and is fundamentally adversarial. You don’t want your employees to feel like they’re working against you, right? Complex intellectual work benefits from a collaborative environment. So unless you can make the work super interesting, it mostly falls to the employees to manage their own akrasia.
This seems valid as far as it goes, but there are common situations where dominance/accountability as a motivation strategy starts to fall apart. I’m thinking mainly of some types of white-collar knowledge work (at a fairly high level) where it’s not easy to tell how hard or effectively someone is working from the outside. Maybe somebody with more management experience can comment on this, but my impression is: As a manager, you want to avoid micromanaging, both because you don’t have the time or expertise for it and because it pisses people off. I think it’s much easier, and maybe more reliable, to try to hire people with “internal motivation” than to try to motivate them via dominance. Dominance as a motivator very easily turns into fear and is fundamentally adversarial. You don’t want your employees to feel like they’re working against you, right? Complex intellectual work benefits from a collaborative environment. So unless you can make the work super interesting, it mostly falls to the employees to manage their own akrasia.