Feel-Good Messaging Won’t Always Motivate Your Employees
The idea that your actions at work contribute to the betterment of society — to help protect the environment, end poverty, or promote social justice — is an inspiring one. Recent research suggests that it can be a powerful motivator too. Indeed, the once-monolithic view of financial incentives as the way to motivate employees has been challenged by a wave of studies showing that linking people’s work to prosocial causes can motivate people in ways that transcend their paycheck or bonus.
Employees want to see themselves as good people and work on behalf of organizations that positively contribute to the world. Consequently, when their actions advance a prosocial cause, they may work harder, for longer hours, and even for less compensation. But is that actually right? We designed a field experiment find out. We randomly assigned employees to view either a prosocial (“limiting pollution”), instrumental (“limiting costs”), or mixed motive (“limiting pollution and limiting costs”) message for caring about bundling each time they access the organization’s procurement system.
To our surprise, the prosocial message was actually the least effective in changing employee behaviors — and the instrumental message was most effective. The mixed motive had less clear effects, but it tended to be in the middle.
