Performance target and effort manipulation: The moderating effects of target difficulty and target conflict
This paper empirically demonstrates that in China's performance management system, the impact of target difficulty and conflict on effort manipulation behaviors varies significantly depending on whether cities can realistically achieve their blue-sky day targets, with difficulty acting as a stronger moderator than conflict.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the world of public administration, governments often rely on performance targets to guide their work. Think of these targets as a checklist of goals, such as reducing pollution or improving economic growth, set by higher authorities for local officials to achieve. This system is designed to create accountability, ensuring that resources are used effectively and that promises made to the public are kept. However, when the pressure to meet these specific numbers becomes too intense, a strange phenomenon can occur. Instead of working harder to genuinely improve the situation, officials may begin to "game" the system. This is not always about lying with numbers, but rather about manipulating their actual effort. They might work frantically to hit a specific mark and then immediately stop, or they might pour all their energy into one goal while ignoring others, simply to satisfy the checklist rather than to create lasting change. Understanding why this happens is crucial, because it reveals how the very tools meant to improve society can sometimes encourage behavior that undermines the public good.
A team of researchers set out to investigate this dynamic by looking at a specific, high-stakes goal in China: the "blue-sky day" target. During the country's 13th Five-Year Plan, from 2016 to 2020, the central government assigned local cities a mandatory number of days per year where the air quality had to be good or moderate. If a city failed to meet this number, local officials faced serious consequences, including stalled projects or even dismissal from their posts. Yet, the system offered no extra reward for exceeding the target; once the number was reached, the pressure was technically off. The researchers focused on how two specific factors influenced whether cities would manipulate their efforts: how hard the target was to reach, and how much it conflicted with the city's economic goals. They examined daily air quality data from 234 cities to see what happened the moment a city realized it had either just met its goal for the year or had definitely failed to do so.
The study uncovered a clear pattern of behavior that depended entirely on whether a city was capable of meeting its target. For the cities that were on track to succeed, the researchers found a "threshold effect." Once these cities realized they had achieved the required number of good air days, their air quality often deteriorated significantly. This drop was not random; it was directly linked to how difficult the target had been. The harder the target was to reach, the more dramatic the decline in air quality became once the goal was crossed. It appears that when officials face a very difficult goal, they view it as a heavy burden. Once they finally clear that hurdle, they feel a strong urge to relax and stop investing resources in air quality, leading to a sharp rebound in pollution. Furthermore, this effect was worse in cities where the goal to clean the air clashed heavily with the goal to grow the economy. In these places, the conflict between protecting the environment and boosting industry made the pressure even more intense, causing officials to cut their efforts even more drastically once the target was met.
The story was quite different for the cities that were not going to meet their targets. These officials faced a "storming effect," where they would suddenly intensify their efforts to improve the air quality as the year came to a close, realizing they could not reach the annual goal. However, the difficulty of the target played a surprising role here as well. The researchers found that when the target was less challenging, these cities improved their air quality more significantly in their final push. Conversely, when the target was extremely difficult, the cities were less motivated to make that last-minute effort. It seems that if a goal feels impossible to reach, officials lose the confidence or the will to try, even when they know they are falling short. Interestingly, for these struggling cities, the conflict between economic and environmental goals did not change their behavior. Whether the economic pressure was high or low, once they realized they would miss the air quality target, their reaction was the same: they either tried to fix it if the goal seemed reachable, or they gave up if it seemed too hard.
The researchers concluded that the way targets are set matters more than previously thought, but the impact depends on who is trying to meet them. For cities that can succeed, making the goal too hard or creating too much conflict with other priorities encourages them to stop working as soon as they pass the finish line. For cities that are struggling, making the goal too hard simply discourages them from trying at all. The study suggests that the difficulty of the target is a stronger driver of this behavior than the conflict between different goals. Ultimately, the findings highlight a flaw in rigid performance systems: when targets are perceived as threats rather than challenges, they can trigger a cycle of short-term fixes and sudden drop-offs in effort, rather than the steady, long-term improvement that public policy aims to achieve.
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