The concept of the intrinsic

In this chapter we depart from the market's central, some say defining, characteristic, exchange, and deal with a cluster of concepts of a different order: intrinsic motivation, process benefits, internal rewards, satisfaction with procedures, and the enjoyment of activities that happen also to be means in any standard endsmeans relation. What these have in common is their focus on activities that are not undertaken for the usual categories of observable rewards but rather because they are rewarding in themselves. The particular focus of our attention is the enjoyment of working per se and the effect of payment on this enjoyment. Counterintuitively, it seems that payment for doing something one enjoys does not add to its utility or pleasure, but detracts from it. This undermining of economic utility has been called The Hidden Cost of Rewards, and we shall adopt this term.

By definition, activities that are satisfying in themselves do not depend for their full worth upon exchange value (how much the activity is worth in the market), nor from their “use value” in the conventional sense of the usefulness of the activities. Rather they derive their value in use by the actor. The satisfaction derived from intrinsically satisfying activities is yielded by an act of consumption, not production. Acts of consumption are not acts of exchange; rather they are normally the ultimate purpose of exchange and follow from exchange or from prior labor. But consumption of enjoyable work activities is different. Employees sell their labor and talent in the labor market and incidentally acquire the opportunity to consume the pleasure of working.