Abstract

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much effort to impressing or pleasing their supervisors, rather than working toward the goals of the organization. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local civil servants and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that civil servants do engage in evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, which likely involve both reallocating work efforts toward job tasks that are more observable to the evaluator, and buttering up the evaluator personally. Importantly, we find that introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator discourages evaluator-specific influence activities and significantly improves the work performance of local civil servants.