Judy Cameron

Judy Cameron is an educational psychology researcher whose work examines rewards, learning, and intrinsic motivation. At the University of Alberta, she coauthored research with Katherine M. Banko and W. David Pierce. Cameron and Pierce also wrote Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation: Resolving the Controversy, published in 2002.

In a 2001 meta-analysis, Cameron, Banko, and Pierce argued that rewards do not uniformly diminish interest in a task. Their findings distinguished initially interesting from less interesting tasks and examined whether rewards were expected, tangible, verbal, or tied to performance. They reported negative effects under some conditions, including expected tangible rewards loosely linked to performance on highly interesting tasks. Other researchers reached a more negative overall assessment of tangible rewards and challenged Cameron’s earlier analysis; the disagreement is part of the research record.

Cameron’s work offers a reason to examine how an incentive is arranged rather than assume that all rewards have the same effect. The experiments reviewed in the meta-analysis do not, on their own, establish what a particular workplace incentive will do to organizational culture.