The Reward Trap
Paying people for behaviors they were doing for free makes them do it less, not more, once the pay stops. Decades of research on this. We keep building programs that ignore it.
In 1973, Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett paid preschoolers to draw with markers. The children had been drawing freely for weeks. After three sessions of paying them, the researchers stopped paying. The kids drew half as much as before the payments started. Not back to baseline. Below it.
The finding has been replicated across age groups, behaviors, and cultures for five decades. Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory names the mechanism: tangible rewards for an already-motivated behavior shift the person's mental frame from "I do this because it matters to me" to "I do this because I'm paid to." Pull the payment, and the original reason doesn't come back automatically.
Now look at your programs. Bonuses for wellness app logins. Points for peer recognition. Gift cards for giving feedback. Each one monetizes a behavior you want people doing because they want to. Each one teaches the frame that makes the behavior fragile.
This isn't an argument against recognition or against compensation. Both matter, loudly. It's an argument against trading cash for behaviors. Pay people well for their work. Don't pay them to care about each other. You can't buy that, and the attempt degrades the thing you were trying to protect.
What scales instead: managers who notice, specifically, out loud, without a points system mediating the signal. That's the only form of recognition the research shows gets stronger over time, not weaker.
