Meaning at work

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "Discover Your Purpose" intervention among 2,976 white-collar employees and evaluate their outcomes over two years. We find that performance increases because the low performers either leave the firm or improve in their current jobs. The trade-off between meaning and pay flattens as those with low meaning and high pay leave the firm. Treatment also reshapes stated priorities and reduces gender gaps in preferences and behaviors, including uptake of parental leave. A cost-benefit analysis reveals high returns that are shared between the firm and the employees through higher bonuses. Finally, we show that observational data obscure these gains, causing firms to underestimate the intervention's true value.

Keywords: incentives; worker motivation; worker performance; meaning-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2104.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Meaning at Work (2025)
Working Paper: Meaning At Work (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2104

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().