We seek sense of purpose.

A few years ago the management professor Adam Grant studied a group of college students who worked as phone solicitors, calling alumni to ask for contributions to their university. As an experiment, Mr. Grant arranged for a recent graduate who had attended the university on a scholarship funded by such solicitation efforts to meet the students. He gave a five-minute talk about how the scholarship had affected his life and how grateful he was for their solicitation efforts. Grant found that the students’ productivity more than doubled afterward. Again, there was no added compensation for the harder work — just a deeper sense of purpose.

Adam, it makes a h-u-g-e difference to be appreciated. I just l-o-v-e the folks who do it :-) :-) 

Ha. Milind, well said. 

Nice to see someone extolling the benefits of good human resources.

One of the things I always find interesting that is touched upon in this article is that

"People are less likely to volunteer to help load a couch into a van when you offer to pay them, because the offer of pay makes their task a commercial transaction rather than a favor to another human being."

There have been similar studies on performance and how when money is involved, the quality of performance actually goes down.