Mission-driven intrinsic motivation and performance of public workers

Mission Development Sessions: These are participatory sessions where workers will be introduced to the mission of the organization through a video recording of the District Health Officer. Facilitators will help the workers discuss and deliberate over this mission statement, and what they thought of the mission of the organization. The sessions will be held once a month for three months. In the subsequent two months, the workers will share the experiences of their routine job and whether they felt any connection between the mission discussed in the first session and their routine jobs. These sessions will also include refresher training for the workers on different aspects of their job such as ante-natal care, diagnosis of common diseases and the importance of clean drinking water.

Performance-based bonus: Workers will be provided an opportunity to earn a bonus based on their performance. The maximum possible bonus is Rs. 500 per month.

The project has three main interventions: mission development workshops and reflection sessions, performance-based bonus, and a placebo refresher treatment, besides a pure control group. We plan to administer the treatments for three consecutive months.
1- Mission development sessions: To intrinsically motivate workers we draw on the theoretical literature that workers care about the mission of organizations (Besley & Ghattak 2005). Recent lab work also provides evidence that workers who select into pro-social jobs further increase their effort when reminded of their mission (Banuri, et al. 2018 WP). We implement mission workshops and reflection sessions to intrinsically motivate workers using a therapy style intervention as described below.
In the first step, we will record a video statement of the district health officer describing and endorsing the mission of the organization. Next, we will organize sessions with the workers to introduce them to the mission via the video message. They will be facilitated to discuss and dissect the mission, describe what they think the mission was and how will they reconcile their beliefs with the one adopted by their manager. The workers will discuss how to better reflect their belief in the mission in their work and performance. After this introductory session, they will meet every month to reflect on their work and share if they had any moment of connection with the mission while they were performing their jobs. These reflection workshops will continue for two months. The purpose of continuing the treatment for three months is to ensure that any behavior change is not just a short-term response, rather the workers' behavior achieves a “steady state” like situation and there is buy-in for the mission from the workers.
The treatment will be administered like a “therapy,” led by facilitators from the research team. The participants will be encouraged to speak freely on the issues related to the mission and motivation. This approach will let the workers introspect rather than provide a target or external incentive to improve performance. To make the sessions more “organic”, they will be interspersed with refreshers on the activities that the workers routinely perform such case studies on importance of advising pregnant and new mothers, nutrition and dietary needs of newborn babies etc.
There are at least two main mechanisms through which workers may change their behavior in response to the mission intervention. First is a change in the preferences of the workers: signaling the importance of work for the organization through pro-social mission may make the workers care more about their job purely for intrinsic reasons. This will be a change in preferences of workers. Second mechanism is through a change in expectation about the social norms in the organizations. Workers’ own preferences may not change but they expect their colleagues to now care more about the job due to the explicit pro-social mission. This second mechanism can further work through two sub mechanisms: first they may care about their colleague’s preferences alone and not worry about their own behavior, second the workers may also care about whether they are seen as adhering to the new social norms or not. We try to assess which of these mechanism may be at play through altering the conditions of treatment as explained in the design section.
2- Financial Incentives: We will provide workers with performance-based bonuses for three months. The amount of the bonus will be Rs. 500 per month, which is roughly three percent of the monthly salary of the worker. Each worker will have an opportunity to earn Rs. 25 per household visited over and above the number households visited in the baseline survey for up to 20 additional households. If the workers reach their assigned number of households before reaching the figure 20, they will be paid the maximum bonus of Rs. 500 for the month. The decision to award bonus will be based on independently collected data through household surveys. This treatment will serve as a benchmark to get at the value of the mission development treatment.
One of the arguments against performance linked incentives in public organizations is the expectation that they crowd out intrinsic motivations. The empirical evidence on crowding out in public sector is mixed and primarily studied at the selection margin (Dal Bó et al. (2013) and Deserranno (2018)). We will cross randomize financial incentives with mission treatment to assess if crowding out does exist for workers who have already selected into the organization. In phase 1 this cross randomization of bonus is only with the public mission treatment, if the PI raised required funds in the phase 2 the interaction with private mission treatment will also be studied.
3- Refresher: This treatment will mimic the mission treatment. Workers in this treatment will meet once every month for three months, but instead of discussing the mission they will only go through the refreshers of their usual activities. These refreshers are also provided in the mission development treatment. This treatment will help rule out two alternative explanations if we see the mission treatment influencing behavior of workers. First, since the main mission treatment works through a group session it is possible that socialization is the main reason behind the change in the behavior of the workers (Feigenberg, Field & Pande 2013). Workers may be using the opportunity to learn from each other outside the concerns for mission. Further, it is possible that the treatments serve as nothing more than a reminder about their duties. With a treatment that mimics the mission sessions, albeit without discussing mission, will help us rule out these alternative explanations.

2019-02-01

2019-09-30

1- Household visits

The variable will be constructed using a survey of households. An independent survey team asks each household whether the worker visited them during the last calendar month or not. The survey will be conducted every month for three months with ten randomly selected households in the community of each worker.

1- Household screened for tuberculosis
2- Number of Vaccination Camps
3- Number of hours worked
4- Incidence of diseases
5- Vaccination status of children
6- Pregnant women examined
7- Children under the age of two examined
8- Underweight children

1,4,5,6 and 7will be measured using household survey
2 and 3 are from worker survey
8 is from administrative data reported by the workers

This will be a randomized control trial where workers will be randomized in 8 treatment conditions.

Group A: This is the main treatment group where the mission-development session is delivered in a group setting. About 20-30 workers gather in one place for this treatment. In this group both mechanisms of changes in preferences and social norms may be at play. The workers are informed in the first session that there will be no discussions on their performance to shut down the behavior that may be driven by an expectation to look compliant with the new norms.
Group B: Workers in this group discuss the mission in private, one-one-one, discussions with the facilitators. The private delivery of the treatment controls for the expectation about changes in social norms, at least in the very short run.
Group C: Mission treatment are delivered in a group setting but unlike Group A the participants are explicitly informed in the first session that their performance will be made observable in the third session. We will not discuss the performance individually but will keep the announcement vague to prime their belief about observability of their actions.
Group D: This group will only participate in refresher training to rule out socialization, learning and reminders as alternative explanation
Group E: The behavior of workers in group C maybe entirely driven by the expectation that their performance will be observable. To rule out that explanation this group of workers receive refresher training only but with an announcement in the first session that workers’ performance will be made observable in the third session.
Group F: This group will receive performance based bonus rewards.
Group G: This group will receive mission-development sessions and an opportunity to win performance based bonus.
Group H: This will be a pure control group, where business as usual will be maintained.

Randomization is done on a computer

Workers will be randomized into treatment, blocked by mother facility.

No

710 workers.

Confirmed 10 households surveyed per month for the duration of the experiment, for confirmed 710 workers.

89 for 6 treatments , 88 for control and 88 for a placebo treatment. May increase if funding becomes available.