Managing the Behavior of Public Frontline Employees through Change-Oriented Training: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Abstract Most public frontline employees work out of sight of management. Direct management through authority and incentives is therefore often challenging. We argue that managers can rely on change-oriented training as an effective management tool that can affect employee behavior and work as an alternative or supplement to commands and incentives. First, we outline the concept of change-oriented training and explain how it can direct the behavior of public employees towards organizational goals and political priorities. Second, we test the effect of change-oriented training on employee behavior in a large-scale field experiment of teachers in Danish public schools. We show that training has a substantial effect on teachers’ behavior in the classroom and infer from this that training should be seen as a valuable management tool with the ability to influence the behavior of frontline employees.