Performance Evaluation, Influence Activities, and Bureaucratic Work Behavior: Evidence from China

Alain Janvry (), Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet (), Shaoda Wang () and Qiong Zhang ()
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Alain Janvry: University of California, Berkeley
Elisabeth Sadoulet: University of California, Berkeley
Shaoda Wang: University of Chicago
Qiong Zhang: Renmin University of China

No 202003, HKUST CEP Working Papers Series from HKUST Center for Economic Policy

Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local senior leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much effort to pleasing their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local government employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that employees do engage in evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and that this process can be partly observed by their co-workers. However, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator discourages evaluator-specific influence activities and significantly improves the work performance of local government employees.

Keywords: subjective evaluation; influence activities; civil servants; work performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 F63 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Working Paper: Performance Evaluation, Influence Activities, and Bureaucratic Work Behavior: Evidence from China (2020)
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