Love the job... or the patient? Task vs. mission-based motiviations in healthcare

Sheheryar Banuri, Philip Keefer and Damien de Walque

No 17-09, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. We shift the focus to task-based motivation and find that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based. Moreover, in the presence of significant task motivation, mission motivation has no additional effect on effort. The evidence emerges from experiments with nearly 250 medical and nursing students in Burkina Faso. The students exert effort in three tasks, from boring to interesting. In addition, for half of the students, mission motivation is present: their effort on the task generates benefits for a charity. Two strong results emerge. First, task motivation has an economically important effect on effort, more than doubling effort. Second, mission motivation increases effort, but only for mundane tasks and not when the task is interesting. Even for mundane tasks, moreover, the effects of mission motivation appear to be less than those of task motivation.

Keywords: public sector reform; civil service; intrinsic motivation; extrinsic motivation; performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 H83 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hea and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Love the Job... or the Patient?: Task vs. Mission-Based Motivations in Health Care (2018)
Working Paper: Love the job... or the patient ? task vs. mission-based motivations in health care (2018)
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