During the Industrial Revolution Era , “Carrot & Stick” technique grew in prominence and produced remarkable results.

The rational principle was to reward people for doing the routine bound work efficiently and this reward in turn resulted in increasing efficiency.

On the flip side , punishing people for being inefficient resulted in improvement of efficiency.

This is in line with behavioral physics as well….

In the modern knowledge worker age , Open source software has grown in prominence.Be it Apache , Github , Linux , Wikipedia all these are examples where intrinsically motivated group of programmers have collaborated just for the sole reason of prosperity and benefit of their fraternity without expecting anything in return.

This is thus totally not explainable by behavioral physics and thus proves that adopting Carrot and Stick approach in the modern knowledge worker age can lead to detrimental results.

Adopted from Daniel Pink’s book Drive.