The Motivation Toolkit: How to Align Your Employees’ Interests with Your Own

Kreps, an economist and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, stretches a single concept into a book’s worth of explication in this enjoyable but slight guide to getting one’s employees and one’s business on the same page. In an ever-more-competitive economy, Kreps observes, employee motivation is now more important to maintain than ever. His answer to this problem rests on “aligning the employee’s interests” with the employer’s. This alignment can come about through higher compensation, or through less tangible incentives, such as the “esteem of co-workers” and “opportunities to learn new skills.” Once this alignment has been established, Kreps promises, all an employer has to do is stand back and let workers achieve. This is an enticing premise, but the rest of the book is there only to prop up this single conclusion. He does provide some conceptual tools, mainly drawn from social scientists, such as the “economic theory of incentives” and the “social-psychological theory of self-determination,” but the most helpful portion of the book is an afterthought: question sets included at the end (e.g., “What is your work technology?”), to be used in place of his personal coaching. There’s some intriguing social science here, but overall the title contains the meat of the book, and the rest is only window dressing. (Jan.)