Mission Motivation and Public Sector Performance: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan
Abstract: This paper studies whether public sector organizations can strengthen the mission motivation of their workers and get them to exert effort on the job. I implement a field experiment in partnership with the Department of Health in Pakistan, where I randomly emphasize the public health mission to community health workers, provide performance-linked financial incentives, or do both. The mission treatment improves worker performance across incentivized (home visits) and non-incentivized tasks, while financial incentives improve performance only on the incentivized task. Financial incentives also become less effective at increasing home visits when combined with the mission treatment. Finally, the mission treatment improves downstream child health outcomes---there is a lower prevalence of diarrhea and higher vaccination rates. These results highlight that promoting an organization's mission can be a powerful motivator for public workers, especially in weakly institutionalized environments.
