Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf.In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation