The bad news is that ignoring ...

The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.
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 Dan Ariely

Quotes from the same author

Motivation, basically getting people to be happy at work, everybody - everybody benefits.
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 Dan Ariely
We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.
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 Dan Ariely
The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
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 Dan Ariely
When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.
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 Dan Ariely
When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it - meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
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 Dan Ariely