One method is to try and use incentives: that means offering money or other rewards. Unfortunately, though, this simply doesn’t tend to work – it fosters poor teamwork and can prevent your team from working their best.

It can even make a team less motivated!

This is best illustrated by something called the ‘candle experiment’, which is an experiment designed to test creativity. Specifically, it is designed to test the ability to overcome a ‘cognitive bias’ called ‘functional fixedness’.

Essentially, functional fixedness causes us to get stuck in one way of thinking, usually about a tool or a task. Here, we tend to fixate on one way of doing something, to the point where we can no longer think of any other solutions or any other contexts.

For example, if someone were to give you a hammer and ask you to open a window, you might smash the glass rather than use the hammer as a lever to pry the window open. Why? Because you can only think of the hammer terms of its main use: hitting things. It requires an extra level of creativity to think outside of that box and to look at a hammer as an implement that can be used in any of a wide number of different ways.

To test this ability, the candle experiment presents participants with a box of tacks and a candle and then asks them to attach the candle to the wall so that it can burn. Most people will attempt to tack the candle to the wall and will find it continually falls off.

But the solution is in fact to tack the box to the wall and then to stand the candle inside it. This requires participants to think outside that box and to think of the box as a part of the experiment and a resource. One way you can do this is by using the psychological experiment of breaking down all the items you have into their constituent parts and materials: you don’t have a candle; you have a candle wax and string for example. A box of tacks is tacks, a box, cardboard, and metal.

What’s interesting and relevant about this study is that when an incentive is introduced (a reward for the person who first comes up with the solution), performance goes down. This makes sense from a neuroscience perspective because motivation gives us focus and focus makes it hard for us to see all possibilities.

Flow states on the other hand encourage the brain to produce anandamide – a neurotransmitter that is correlated with creativity and lateral thinking. So, you need to move your team away from working toward a reward and toward thinking of the work as rewarding.

Plus, we all know that as soon as we start doing something for money or grades it becomes less fun. Therefore no one enjoys their college courses – even though they chose the subject!

Teamwork and Incentives

The other problem with incentives is that they make us less likely to work as teams. One way to think about this is by looking at the military.

In the military, one member will often be willing to give their life for the rest of the team. And they are rewarded for this mentality – they are rewarded for sacrificing their own needs for the betterment of everyone else.

But in the case of business, we are often encouraged instead to sacrifice others to get ahead. We are rewarded for making the most sales in our team, which encourages us to pilfer sales from other salesmen and women.

Rewarding individuals gives them a good reason to tread on each other to get ahead.