A field experiment on the impact of beneficiary contact on federal employee perceptions of prosocial impact and social worth

Prior research examining the impact of beneficiary contact has demonstrated that brief interactions with beneficiaries can have large impacts on persistence and performance. However, that research has focused on undergraduate students, call center workers, and volunteers. Little is known about how beneficiary contact can affect public sector employees, like government workers, who have different motivations for their work. In this study, we conduct a cluster-randomized field experiment to examine the influence of beneficiary contact on federal employee perceptions of prosocial impact and social worth and examine how existing opportunities for contact with citizens may moderate the effect. We find that beneficiary contact has a small, though positive and significant influence on social worth, but no effect on prosocial impact. We rely on qualitative interviews to provide additional context for these results and examine implications for relational job design in the public sector.