Why High Participation but Low Quality? The Policy Implementation Paradox and Micro-Mechanism of Online Public Services Under the Systems Engineering Education Perspective

Ensuring that government-led large-scale online public services evolve from formal participation to substantive quality represents a key governance challenge. This study extends the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) by integrating value identity as a core value-rational driver and by taking self-reported teaching practice quality as the ultimate outcome variable. Based on a cross-sectional survey of 2226 teachers analyzed via structural equation modeling, our findings reveal a stark ‘Governance Paradox’: at the aggregate level, both Behavioral Intention (β = −0.213) and Social Influence (β = −0.098) are unexpectedly associated with lower self-reported teaching practice quality, despite Value Identity being a powerful predictor of intention (β = 0.900). We conceptualize this statistical paradox not as an anomaly, but as a diagnostic for misaligned subsystems within a complex socio-technical system. Crucially, this paradox is systematically resolved through multi-group analysis; disaggregating the sample by institutional context reveals the expected positive relationships within homogeneous subgroups. This suggests that hidden heterogeneity and contextual factors are responsible for distorting the aggregate picture. Theoretically, this research offers two contributions: it reframes statistical aggregation artifacts as a systems-diagnostic framework for governance and introduces “Motivation Fusion” as a micro-foundational mechanism to explain the institutional and psychological conditions that produce such artifacts. Practically, the study provides a micro-foundational diagnostic framework for designing more targeted and effective public service policies.