Motivating Public Sector Employees: Public Good Contributions in Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority

Résumé

We present a lab-in-the-field experiment with employees of the Addis Ababa Water and Sanitation Authority with the aim to understand how to improve coordination and collaboration in their daily crew work. Participants play a series of public good games under different rules: standard game, with identifiable set of partners, game with threshold, and game with a randomly selected anonymous leader with the power to punish. We show that a common goal, in the form of a threshold to be attained for the group success, is significantly more effetive than a potentially punishing leader to increase individual effort and ultimately group outcomes. This result advocates for the introduction of team goals as coordination and motivation devices in settings where tasks are performed by groups and are subject to free-riding and coordination challenges.