Sorry for the lack of specifics. I'm thinking of Daniel Pink's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It references studies showing that the presence of a monetary reward in situations that require abstract thinking tend to result in worse performance than no reward at all.
Maybe my assumption that this is a widely held belief was wrong.
It seems to work for Google. I'm just curious what it is about their implementation or culture that makes this the case.
Ah, yes, I'm actually a big fan of Pink's book. The Founders' Awards aren't really "financial incentives", though, but rather about recognizing work that really affected the history or technology of the company.
Speaking generally again, I think Pink's ideas oversimplify "work" when they label it as "creative" or "manual". This goes doubly wrong when if we try to incentivize one or the other. At least from my experience, successful projects require both great creativity and a hell of a lot of grunt work.
Maybe my assumption that this is a widely held belief was wrong.
It seems to work for Google. I'm just curious what it is about their implementation or culture that makes this the case.
This TED talk summarizes the book: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html