How not to motivate your maid

If you manage a typical household, you would have issues with your maid! It is an ordeal to find one to do your household chores. But assuming you do hire one, you may have to generally suffer due to her sloppy work or irregular schedule. The question is: Can you motivate your maid to do better work by offering her a higher salary? It turns out that behavioural psychology can offer some insights into this issue. How?

As humans, we perform activities based on incentives. You work because you are paid to do so. But be careful on how you apply monetary incentives to motivate your maid! Why? Your maid may show renewed interest in her household chores for a month or two if you offer her higher salary. Then, she may get comfortable with the fact that she receives a higher pay. And that means that she may just as well revert to her irregular routine or sloppy work!

Now that you have already hiked her salary, can you motivate her by threatening to cut her pay? You may want to consider this experiment conducted by psychologists before you do so!

In one study, researchers asked two groups to solve some puzzles over three days. One group was never paid during the three days for the activity. The second group was paid for solving puzzles on the second day. And on the third day, the second group was paid only partly for the same activity. Researchers found that the second group increased its activity on the second day when they received full compensation but decreased their activity on the third day. Interestingly, the group that never received any compensation consistently solved similar number of puzzles on all three days.

extrinsic motivation

The researchers concluded that self-interest or intrinsic motivation was the reason that prompted the unpaid group to continue working on the puzzles. The other group, having received compensation once, looked for extrinsic motivation or monetary reward to complete the activity.

If you were to cut your maid’s pay, she will most likely react the same way as the second group! You should not be surprised by this behaviour. We react more to losses than to gains of similar magnitude! That is, the pain that we suffer from losing Rs 10,000 is far more than the pleasure that we receive from gaining Rs 10,000. This means you simply cannot raise your maid’s salary and then cut-back if she does not perform well.

Behavioural psychology may not, perhaps, offer secrets to motivating your maid, but it does suggest that trying to do so using monetary rewards may not work for long!

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