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.