Two new points on “Would you do it again for free?”
Continuing my study of whether or not external rewards kill intrinsic motivations, I read a paper Norms, Rewards and Their effect on the Motivation of Open Source Software Developers that Luis pointed me at and Matt Asay blogged about. (For the record, the paper is as long as its title implies it might be.) The authors of the paper were also interested in whether or not paying open source developers would demotivate them. They did a survey with college kids that concluded that paying open source software developers doesn't demotivate them. However, I think and they agreed, that the research has yet to be done on a real open source software project. They did point out three really interesting facts.
- Self-reported interest (intrinsic motivations) increase with payment if payment is a "normal" part of the process. So since software developers are often paid to write software, paying developers to work on open source software is not likely to be demotivating. (Note that if the external reward is not part of the norm, it actually ends up being demotivating!)
- External rewards tied to completing a task or tied to performance are most demotivating. That would imply that bounties (for adding a feature or fixing a bug) are more demotivating than collecting a paycheck to work on a project.
- Informational rewards are more motivating (or less demotivating) than control rewards. So receiving a good performance review (informational reward) is more motivating than being paid to add a feature you think doesn't fit. This goes with #2. Performance goals and task completion goals are seen as more controlling and less informational.
