Stakeholder's Perception Of Appraisal Politics In Local Government:Identification,Classification And Factor Analysis

Government performance appraisal,with performance improving and public interest safeguarding as its dual goals,does gain wide attention in public sector.In pursuit of the accuracy of performance appraisal results,the self-serving orientation of government officer greatly drive various stakeholders to intentionally or unintentionally exert various intervention,influence and even manipulation of performance appraisal,resulting in the perception of appraisal politics to certain extent.Perception of Appraisal Politics(PAP)is theoretically defined as appraisees' perceptions of a range of appraiser's actions(top-down managing,coordinating and balancing,etc.),appraisees' actions(bottom-up eluding,appealing,vertical colluding,conversing,etc.),peer appraisees' actions(inter-subjective co-opetition,horizontal colluding,etc.)and the other organizational politics phenomena.In line with the previous research achievements,this research utilizes the Delphi method to establish a scenarios-based Appraisal Judgment Scale for public sector employees,and furthermore employs the comprehensive quantitative analysis methods such as Frequency Analysis,Mean Square Error Analysis and Mean Difference Test to examine the listed items(including overall scenarios,aggregation scenarios)and background information's impact.As a result,this research finds that respondents had relatively high identification of certain scenarios,and the judgment for the perceiving degree was relatively consistent with each other,and vice versa;in addition,there are significant differences in the perception among respondents of different ages and administration rankings.After deleting 4 items with relatively weak perceiving,the factor analysis results in 3-category classification from the listed 16 items: inter-agency Relationship(Bureaucracy)implies that the organizational relationships are usually used to manipulate and interfere the performance appraisal;Internal system maintenance(System)indicates that the behaviors that influencing appraisal aim at maintaining the internal system of organizational structure;Hierarchical interaction(Interaction)implies the direct interaction between superior and subordinate bodies.Meanwhile,this research also uses exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to pursue analysis by means of Appraisal Cognition Scale,and finds that all the listed items could be divided into 4categories: Rule,Feedback,Explanation and Initiative.The 4 categories of the Cognition Scale and the 3 categories of the Judgment Scale are jointly used to explore the influencing factors of the stakeholder`s perception of appraisal politics in public sector.In conclusion,rule has evidently negative relation with the bureaucracy,system and interaction,while a significant positive influence between the feedback and the interaction does exist;the explanation has significant positive relation with the bureaucracy,system and interaction,while a significant negative influence between the initiative and the bureaucracy,system does exist.This research attempts to explore a new research subject by means of transferring the precept of PAP into public administration studies and thus attain certain progress.