Does Work Quality Differ between the Public and Private Sectors? Evidence from Two Online Field Experiments

Understanding the differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field experiments with a routine data processing task and workers recruited through an online labor market. Workers were randomly allocated information about the ownership status of a nursing home as either a public organization or a private company. Work quality was measured as errors workers made in data entry and correcting pre-existing errors in work materials provided to them. The first experiment showed that fewer workers in the public, compared to the private, nursing home tended to make any data entry errors but that they did not correct more existing errors. Exploratory analyses showed a greater effect for those aware of the organization’s ownership status. To test this apparent sector attention effect, we conducted a second experiment with a 2-by-2 factorial design randomly allocating workers to a treatment making salient the public or private sector status of the organization, in addition to the initial public or private sector treatment. The results confirmed the effect of public sector status and sector attention in combination; workers who were assigned to a public sector organization rather than a private company and who were made aware of the respective sector status were more likely to perform their work tasks without any errors. We discuss the limits of the findings and their implications including that public organizations could boost the quality of work done by making their sector status more explicit to workers.