How to screen for motivated workers who are drawn to your social mission: Offer low pay

Providing employees with a social “mission” in their jobs doesn’t increase their effort: In an experiment in which workers could generate donations to NGOs of their choice, people whose jobs had a mission made no more effort than purely self-interested workers, say Sebastian Fehrler of the University of Zurich and Michael Kosfeld of Goethe University Frankfurt. However, there’s a subgroup of workers who choose mission-oriented jobs, and these workers tend to be more motivated. If you’re a mission-driven company, you can screen for them by offering low salaries, the researchers say. –Andrew O’Connell, http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/how-to-find-motivated-workers-who-are-drawn-to-social-missions-offer-low-pay/?utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet&utm_campaign=Socialflow

SOURCE: Pro-social missions and worker motivation: An experimental study