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

We present a lab-in-the-field experiment with employees of the Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority to understand how to improve coordination and collaboration in their daily work. Participants play a series of public good games under different rules: a standard game, a game with a threshold, and a game with a randomly selected anonymous monitor who has the power to punish. We show that a common goal, in the form of a threshold to be attained for the group’s success, is significantly more effective than a potentially punishing monitor for increasing individual effort and, ultimately, group outcomes (conditional on the threshold being attained). 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.