4 ms·

Is being poor the greatest motivator?

• webmaven 4y ago
  Nope nope nope. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is not a valid social policy (or management theory) for maximizing well being, productivity, income, or long term life outcomes of any sort. Of course, if what you're actually trying to do is improve your negotiating position vs the workers you're hiring (ie. you're trying to lower labor costs, not increase returns), the strategy has advantages. A related data point: the US armed forces investigated whether recruits from various adverse backgrounds (poverty, precarity, broken homes, gang membership, etc.) performed better as soldiers (colloquially, "were tougher"), and the answer was unequivocally no; the best performing (and least likely to "crack") soldiers under challenging combat conditions came from stable middle class home environments. But, recruitment still tends to target the poor, largely because the incentives are more attractive to that demographic and seen as a viable "way out".