The mission of a job affects the type of worker attracted to an organization but may also provide incentives to an existing workforce. We conducted a natural field experiment with 246 short-term workers. We randomly allocated some of these workers to either a prosocial or a commercial job. Our data suggest that the mission of a job has a performance-enhancing motivational impact on particular individuals only, those with a prosocial attitude. However, the mission is very important if it has been actively selected. Those workers who have chosen to contribute to a social cause outperform the ones randomly assigned to the same job by about half a standard deviation. This effect seems to be a universal phenomenon that is not driven by information about the alternative job, the choice itself, or a particular subgroup.

工作的任务会影响被组织吸引的工人的类型，但也可能会激励现有的劳动力。我们对246名短期工人进行了自然田野试验。我们将其中一些工人随机分配到从事社会工作或商业工作。我们的数据表明，工作任务仅对具有亲社会态度的个人具有绩效增强的动机影响。但是，如果任务被积极选择，那么它是非常重要的。选择为社会事业做出贡献的那些工人的表现要比随机分配给同一份工作的那些工人的表现差约标准差的一半。这种影响似乎是一种普遍现象，并不是由有关替代工作，选择本身或特定子组的信息驱动的。