What really motivates employees to be productive? Is it money? Recognition? Job satisfaction? Benefits? Opportunities? Employees are recognized as the most crucial asset of today’s organizations by both practitioners and academics. Employee satisfaction is stressed as one of the most important drivers of continuous improvement and satisfied customers in most classical total quality management (TQM) literature. But what really motivates employees to be productive in their jobs? Two often mentioned motivators are money and job satisfaction. We hear that better pay motivates employees to be more productive. We also hear that “happy employees are productive employees.”

But is there any truth to these sayings or are they just fictional beliefs? Anyone who has ever taken a course in social science has discovered that common sense beliefs are not always validated by scientific research. In some cases, common sense beliefs are just plain wrong. Take “opposites attract,” for example. This is not true. An overwhelming amount of research indicates that we tend to be attracted to people who are similar to ourselves. Thus, “birds of a feather flock together” is true; but “opposites attract” is false. The only way to know if money and job satisfaction really influence productivity is to look at the results of scientific studies. Let’s begin with what researchers have discovered about money.