Research On The Assessment And Influencing Factors Of College-graduate Village Officials Performance

The policy of encouraging college students to serve as village officers is a vital and innovative strategy adopted by the Party Central Committee under new historical conditions with a view to advancing various undertakings in building a new socialist countryside and cultivating a large group of loyal and reliable successors to the cause of socialism. Since its implementation, this strategy has created good economic and social benefits, playing an important role in promoting the construction of rural grass-root organizations, boosting local economic development, maintaining social stability and alleviating employment pressure of college graduates. But as it is not long since this policy has been implemented, many problems have inevitably emerged during its execution due to incomplete institutional construction and inadequate supporting measures. One of the major problems demanding prompt solution is the imperfect performance assessment system of college-graduate village officials.Combining theoretical research with empirical research, this study will systematically and deeply probe into the performance assessment system of college-graduate village officials and identify factors influencing their performance. Firstly, a questionnaire survey is conducted in three representative provinces-Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong to investigate the present situation of the implementation of the policy. This preliminary research provides realistic basis for identifying assessment indexes and influencing factors and proposing improvement plan. Then, after defining job responsibility of college-graduate village officials and referring to relevant researches, the paper intends to examine the performance of college-graduate village officers from four dimensions, namely job performance, relation performance, study performance and innovation performance. On this basis, an index system of performance assessment is constructed and testified through questionnaire survey and statistical analysis. Thirdly, comparing common methods of performance evaluation, we choose to adopt the factor analysis method and wavelet neural network to build a performance assessment model respectively. It is found through empirical study that the model using wavelet neural network is more suitable for assessing the performance of college-graduate village official with higher identification precision, approximation capability and convergence rate. At last, through theoretical study, literature review and status analysis, the factors influencing the performance of college-graduate village officers are identified as individual features, economic and policy environment and support from leaders and local people. Corresponding research hypothesis have been put forward. On this basis, through exploratory factor analysis, reliability and validity analysis and confirmatory factor analysis on questionnaire data, we testified the influencing factors and research hypothesis and then offered policy proposals for improving the performance of college-graduate village officials from the following aspects:improving their job competence, strengthening support for their work and perfecting the safeguard mechanism of their vocational development.The innovations of the research are as follows:Firstly, considering the job responsibilities and characteristics, we set up a performance assessment system composed of four dimensions---job performance, relation performance, study performance, and innovation performance---is constructed, which deepens our understanding of the performance of college-graduate village officials and research about performance evaluation; Secondly, a performance assessment model based on wavelet neural network is built, which innovates the application of assessment models and makes the performance assessment more scientific; Thirdly, though experimental investigation, we found that personal feature, economics and policy environment, support from leaders and local people are the main factors influencing the performance of college-graduate village officials. This finding not only enriches researches into the antecedents to performance, but also provides a theoretical basis for making decisions in promoting college-graduate village officials’ performance.