Adverse effects of control? Evidence from a field experiment

We conduct a field experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk (“AMT”) workers to causally assess the effect of introducing a control mechanism in an existing work relationship on workers’ performance on tasks of varying difficulty. We find that introducing control significantly reduces performance. This reduction occurs primarily on challenging tasks, while performance on simple tasks is unaffected. The negative effects are primarily driven by workers who exhibit non-pecuniary motivation in the absence of control. Our results show that there are adverse effects of control, and they suggest that these adverse effects are of particular concern to firms that rely on high performance on challenging tasks.