Stay in Afghanistan or withdraw troops?

Motivation

In class Monday we watched a video on what motivates us. This is my second time watching this and I loved it just as much this time as I did the first. He took a very effective approach with this lecture. He started out explaining the typical assumption, if you reward something you get more behavior you want, and if you punish something, you get less behavior you want. This said, top performers get a bigger reward and lower performers are ignored. Four economists, two from MIT, one from University of Chicago, and one from Carnegie Mellon, did a study that proved this assumption wrong. They proved that a larger reward lead to poor performance when you are above rudimentary cognitive skill. When a task gets complicated this type of reward does not work. They discovered three factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction. These three factors are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed. Mastery is the urge to get better at something. Purpose is the reason why you are at work and what you need to accomplish. We can relate these three factors to the equity theory, which we discussed in class. The equity theory is about incentives. If the incentives are beneficial to the employees, they will engage in activities they like. This is kind of like the company that gave employees 24 hours to work on whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and with whomever they wanted. In these 24 hours, employees accomplished a huge amount of work and came up with innovative ideas. There are three things that make up the equity theory, effort that leads to performance, which leads to various outcomes. Effort and autonomy can be related because the more effort you put into a task, usually you have a desire to get somewhere with your work. Performance and mastery can be related because everyone has the urge to excel at what they’re doing so their interactions within the company increase. Finally purpose can be related to the various outcomes as a result. You are working for a firm so you can produce results with the materials you’re working with. 

The Organizatonal Kid

I personally believe that the amount of success that students at Princeton University have can be due to the parenting ways of the parents. To attend Princeton, students are not paying the price we pay here at Shippensburg. The kids attending Princeton usually have parents that have high paying jobs, which are also very good jobs. They are more likely to raise their kids similar to the way they were raised. With that being said, I think they push their kids to become “Future Workaholics of America” and become the best of the best. The students are putting so much effort into their schoolwork that they have no time to get involved in larger issues. This could be an issue in the future because if every student is putting all their time into school, how is a student suppose to follow politics, or get involved in crusades? 

The author also mentioned in the article that these students are extremely respectful to authority. I believe a big part of this deals with not only Princeton students, but also people all over the world. Our society has a “norm” that everyone wants to follow. It is not a part of the “norm” to argue or disobey people of authority. We can see this early on in out childhood years. If we were told in kindergarten to get in a straight line, we all followed the teacher’s directions and formed a straight like. As a college student if we are told to hand in a paper on a specific date we do what we are told and turn in the paper that day.