Performance Feedback, Target-Setting, and Data Manipulation in a Multi-Goal Situation: Evidence from Chinese Cities

While it is well recognized that performance management can induce gaming responses, the extant literature has mostly adopted a sole-goal perspective and neglected the influences of the interplay among multiple goals. This research attempts to fill this gap by bringing in the multi-goal perspective and investigating how performance feedback on the focal goal and targets set by higher-up authorities for the conflicting goal affect, independently and interactively, public organizations' data manipulation in the focal goal. We posit that negative performance feedback on the focal goal makes public organizations more inclined to engage in data manipulation, and the target of a conflicting goal set by their higher-up authorities exerts influences by positively moderating this effect. Utilizing the context of China's 'environment-economy' nexus, our empirical analyses using a novel approach to measuring cities' manipulation of air quality data find robust evidence strongly supporting the theoretical arguments. This study represents an effort to open up a research agenda that engages the multi-goal perspective in gaming research.