Leadership Mobility and Target Adaptation: Does Previous Target Achievement Matter?

Abstract

Target setting (or goal setting) is a process of incremental adaptation. Prior studies have mainly focus on organization-level adaptation of performance target setting. Based on the geographical leadership mobility within the Chinese political personnel system, this study explores leader-level adaptation of their organizations’ performance target setting. Using a Chinese province-level panel data-set from 1999 to 2019, we empirically confirm that performance targets in one administrative jurisdiction where the current incumbent provincial governor previously served positively influence performance targets in their current provincial leadership position. Furthermore, if the performance targets in the provincial governor’s previous working locality were achieved successfully, the provincial governor will be more motivated to learn from past target-setting experiences. Finally, provincial governors show significantly different policy learning motivation in economic growth target setting before and after the reform of China’s cadre evaluation system in 2013. These findings show that local executives display conditional learning in their individual-level targets aspiration adaptation process.