Was watching this very interesting talk about motivation from the perspective of a social scientist. Very compelling speech, and counter-intuitive results from the findings.

Some key findings:
1) Traditional rewards systems resulted in lower productivity in creative work.
2) These reward systems only produced more output in cases where the work is "mechanical". Also called "tunnel vision effect".
3) Speaker talked about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, with a focus on Autonomy.
4) Autonomy has been implemented in Google, where 20% of the employees' time is allocated for any work that they are interested in.

You can find the link to the talk here.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation