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 Sanitation 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 with 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 * We thank Cesar Mantilla, Erin McDonnell and seminar participants at the ASFEE Virtual seminar and SEEDEC for their comments and suggestions, and Guillem Foucalt for excellent research assistance.