Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58548 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6460
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Do employees work harder if their job has the right mission? In a laboratory labor market experiment, we test whether subjects provide higher effort if they can choose the mission of their job. We observe that subjects do not provide higher effort than in a control treatment. Surprised by this finding, we run a second experiment in which subjects can choose whether they want to work on a job with their preferred mission or not. A subgroup of agents (roughly one third) is willing to do so even if this option is more costly than choosing the alternative job. Moreover, we find that these subjects provide substantially higher effort. These results suggest that relatively few workers can be motivated by missions and that selection into mission-oriented organizations is important to explain empirical findings of lower wages and high motivation in the latter.
Subjects: 
motivation
effort provision
contract choice
sorting
lab experiment
JEL: 
C92
J33
M52
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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