The Study On The Mechanism Of Intrinsic And External Motivation In Incentive Theory Based On EEG Signal Analysis

Incentive is one of the most important management functions in entrepreneurship which is also a crucial research field of management theory. Throughout the whole20th century, incentives have got a lot of attentions form management scientists, psychologists and sociologists, those who made a lot of incentive theory on the base of management practices and background of that time. Howerer, with the advent and development of networking and globalization, competition among the companies increased, resulted in high demand of personnel. Therefore, managers have imperative demands for constructing adaptive incentive theories; especially in China in which the economic and social transformations are ongoing. Actually, incentive is the stimulation of motivation, that is, motivation is an important factor in the study of the incentive theory.In recent years, on the other hand, with the development of natural science, more and more interdisciplinary studies were conducted. In the economic and management field, there appeared some theoretical research based on neuroscience approachs, accompanied with the emergence of Neuroeconomics, Neuromarketing, Neuromanagement and other interdisciplines. Neuromanagement is an interdiscipline employs neuroscience methods and techniques to study the classic management issues, which is also a branch of management science and engineering. The purpose of neuromanagement is to build management behavior model for the study of various management issues. It is a new growing point in management science and engineering research. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) technology is a widely used technque in cognitive neuroscience, which is also one of the most mature neuroscience research tools. ERPs collect the data of neural activity when the brain works, and then analysis the collected data offline to gain the stable endogenous physiological indicators, which can quantitatively detect subjective indicators which are difficult to be measured by traditional methods. Therefore, the current study employs ERPs to study the intrinsic and external motivation, only to find neural evidence of intrinsic and external motivation in the brain level, in order to make up for past measurement methods of motivation.The first study of the current paper employed ERPs to explore the degree of intrinsic motivation of different tasks, and how this difference presents in in the brain level. Study1explored the neural index of motivation which is the basis of the subsequent two researches.The second study of this paper was conducted based on the conclusions of the first study and previous classic behavioral studies on motivation. We also use the ERPs to extract quantitative neural indicators to explore the neural and mental process of how the external material reward influences on the intrinsic motivation, in order to explan this phenomenon on the brain level.The third study was an extension of the second study which examined how the external mental reward influences the intrinsic motivation based on the above mentioned material reward study. The current study also employed ERP technique to explorer and explan the phenomenon on the brain level.Through the above mentioned three studies, we got the following four basic conclusions:1) The strength of motivation can be characterized by neural index in all stages of the task, including the task prompted stage, the task execution stage and the feedback stage.2) The task itself has intrinsic motivation, but the external material incentives could undermine this kind of intrinsic motivation, which is not conducive to sustainable development of motivation. This kind of effect can not only be manifested at the behavioral level, but also can be expressed in the fluctuation of FRN amplitude at the feedback stage.3) Beacuae of the mental motivation does not contain any control meaning, generally, the external mental motivation would enhance the intrinsic motivation and make the intrinsic motiovation work continuously. This is different form the material incentives and the neural and mental processes of the two phenomena are also different.4) The strength of motivation is corraltae with the subjective value assessment of the task rather than with the allocation of attention resources because of the concentration of attention will be interfere with fatigue and other external factors.The current study is a pioneer work in the field of Neuromanagement, its innovation contains selection of research methods, content and the explaination of the conclusions, mainly in the following three aspects:1) In this study, we concered the realationship between intrinsic motivation and external motivation in the theory of incentives based on the perspective of EEG signal analysis with ERP technology. There are two meanings in this study; first of all, it extended people’s understanding of the motivation from behavioral level to the brain level, and made deeper understanding of the motivation problem. At the same time, it also achieves the quantitative measurement of motivation which is always difficult to quantify. The millisecond precision of ERP technology recorded EEG changes in the whole process; therefore, the relationship of intrinsic and external motivation was studied on the time course and revealed the psychological and neurological black box which was difficult to realisze with the traditional research tools. On the other hand, the study belongs to the neuromanagement filed which was an interdiscipline of management and neuroscience. The current study is a validation and supplements of neuromanagement which also provided a model for subsequent studies.2) We explain the relationship between intrinsic and external motivation from the perspective of neurological and psychological processes which supported the basic assumptions of the classical theory, and improved the traditional incentive models. Previous studies about intrinsic and external motivation were always conducted in the field of social psychology which often employed the behavioral experiments menthod and interpreted it from perspective of cognition. In the management perspective, the current study explain the different neural and psychological processes of the influence of material and spiritual rewards on instrinsic motivation, and proposed a new incentive process model accordingly.3) Based on the study of the relationship between intrinsic and external motivation we focued on the problem of ongoing incentive. Previous researches on motivation theory always concerned about the effectiveness of incentives, including the proposion of the existing incentive theory. However, in addition to the effectiveness of incentive, the sustainability of incentive theory is also a very interesting problem. The conclusions of this study recommended managers to pay more attention to the sustainability of incentives which make a multiplier effect of incentive.