Prior research suggests that controls can negatively impact the motivation of employees to exert effort and that the detrimental effects of controls depend on control source. That is, controls cause more adverse behavior when employees attribute the source of control implementation to their manager’s decision than when the source of control implementation is beyond their manager’s authority. This study uses experiments to investigate whether the behavioral effects of controls depend not only on control source, but also on control framing, by which managers can frame the control implementation either for monitoring or coordinating purposes. The study also suggests that the interaction of control source and control framing impacts the strength of vertical collective identity, i.e. the shared identity between managers and employees, which in turn explains the differences in employee effort. While this study documents that the interaction of control source and control framing has no effect on vertical collective identity or employee effort, it finds a surprising result: employees respond more positively to the monitoring-framed controls than to the coordinating-framed controls, particularly when the controls are imposed by the manager. This finding suggests that persuasive messages can backfire if the employees are aware of the manager’s potentially self-serving motives behind the control implementation.