Enhancing or attenuating? How patronage ties moderate the impact of performance feedback on performance improvement in the public sector

This research investigates how performance feedback affects public organizations' performance improvement and, more importantly, how patronage ties moderate the impact. Using China's official city air quality ranking as the case, our empirical analyses with standard panel data models and the regression discontinuity design find that negative performance feedback leads to subsequent performance improvement and, more crucially and interestingly, that patronage ties enhance, rather than attenuate, this effect. Essentially, this study deepens and extends the performance feedback theory in the public sector by bringing in informal political institutions as boundary conditions, offering more nuanced understandings of organizational responses to performance feedback.