MOTIVATION / 001 [DO BONUSES MAKE YOU PERFORM BETTER?]

Question
What drives performance more: enjoying your sport, or being rewarded for it?

Study
Researchers combined 40 years of research: 154 sources with more than 200,000 people from school, work and sport. They looked at how enjoying a task and getting rewards for it each relate to performance.

Findings
Enjoying the activity itself was linked to better performance, and that link was strongest in sport and physical activity. It mattered most for quality, how well you do something, and less for quantity, how much you do. Rewards also helped, mainly for quantity. For quality, enjoyment mattered far more than rewards. The type of reward made a difference too. With indirect rewards, like a basic salary or good facilities, enjoyment kept driving performance. With direct bonuses, like a premium per win, enjoyment played a smaller role.

What It Means for Athletes
Rewards are not the enemy. They work fine for simple, countable things like the number of sessions or reps. But the things that really make you better, like technique, decisions and creativity, run on enjoying your sport. Big bonuses tied directly to results can push that enjoyment to the background. Most of these studies measured everything at one moment, so they show links, not proof of cause.

Try this: next time you promise yourself a reward, check what it's for. Rewards work for quantity goals like "three gym sessions this week". For quality goals like "a better first touch", skip the reward and track your progress instead. The feeling of getting better is the motivator.

Source
Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), pp. 980 to 1008.

BEHIND THE SCIENCE
Translating sports science into information athletes can actually use.