Making Recognition Count: Evidence from a Public Sector Teacher Training in Pakistan

Motivating frontline public servants is a central challenge in many low- and middle-income countries, where accountability is weak and financial incentives often infeasible. We provide experimental evidence on whether recognition can motivate effort among 3,394 public school head teachers in Punjab, Pakistan. Embedded in a mandatory leadership training, the experiment included four treatments. In the Peer arm, top performers were acknowledged before their cohort and district colleagues, making peer-esteem salient. In the Career arm, names of top performers were shared with departmental and district leadership, making career incentives salient. Two additional arms combined each approach with motivational framing. Making career incentives salient improves training test scores by 0.33 standard deviations, with larger effects among teachers with stronger career stakes - those on permanent contracts, visible to supervisors, or nearing promotion eligibility. In contrast, the Peer arm and motivational framing yield no measurable gains. While the Career arm improves performance during training, these gains do not translate to downstream outcomes such as teacher absenteeism or student exam pass rates. These findings show that recognition motivates effort when it credibly sharpens career incentives in hierarchical bureaucracies. However, training-stage knowledge gains may be insufficient to improve service delivery without stronger school-level implementation support.