There's a video making the rounds now on some psychological experiments wich looked at using financial incentives to make people to work harder. The outcome of these experiments were unexpected; if a task was highly cognitive (as most white-collar tasks are), performance dropped as financial incentives were increased.

According to the video, we can conclude from these experiments that the human mind does not abide by the rules of the "free market", as there are a basket of things people look at when trying to determine if a piece of work motivates them.

Specifically, the video proposes those three things are:
1) Autonomy - the ability to follow one's own path
2) Challenge and Mastery - something is to be gained personally from performing the task (other than financial reward)
3) Purpose - something is to be gained by "the greater good" as a result of the completion of the task.

As an example of this, the video references open source software - software projects which many highly educated, highly paid people work on without any financial renumeration at all. Why do people work on open source software? Because they like self-directed work, the challenge of the work, or the feeling of contributing back to society as a whole with their free code contribution.

Anyways, interesting video as it flys in the face of many traditional organizational behaviour (HR) practices