Nevertheless, the idea that you would like managers and owners to have incentives aligned still has merit. In the family business literature it has been shown that businesses with adequate controls are less likely to suffer from one group of owners exploiting another group.

One important difference between motivation studies and agency studies is level of analysis. Motivation studies tended to look at the how to best reward individual workers. Agency theory tends to look at top management.

“one is said to be intrinsically motivated to perform an activity when one receives no apparent reward except the activity itself” — Edward Deci

SRP, that’s what I meant by saying that intrinsically motivated employees may well by opportunists.

Steve, It is not formally hard. And it is being done, eg., by some of the Zürich folks.

Of course, intrinsic motivation might be “bad for practice”, since the happy, intrinsically motivated worker has a family at home that can’t eat intrinsic motivation for dinner or wear it on their back. And maybe this whole notion of intrinsic motivation is just a way for the capitalists to oppress the working classes–whenever they come in to the boss’s office to ask for a raise, the boss calls his intrinsic motivation into question.

I thought motivation is a concept entirely of the human mind, and therefore is always intrinsic. How can a certain “thing” (money, whip, etc.) possibly have any meaning outside our minds?