In the last few years, a lot of positive incentive efforts have been made to mobilize the enthusiasm of grassroots civil servants from top to bottom, such as parallel ranks, assessment, and rewards, “creating flow”, but the problem of low enthusiasm of grassroots civil servants is still widespread and there is an incentive dilemma for grassroots civil servants, so this paper aims to explore the internal mechanism of the dilemma.
Based on the field survey, participatory observation, and in-depth interviews, this paper clarifies the promotion phenomenon and logic of a district-level unit in A Province in the central region from 2017 to 2022.
The field survey shows that firstly, the methods of motivating grassroots civil servants usually include spiritual rewards, material rewards, and promotion incentives. However, in grassroots practice, these three types of incentives can be boiled down to two different types, namely, core incentives with promotion as a means of reward, and marginal rewards with material and spiritual rewards as the means. Secondly, due to the scarcity of reward resources, the implementation of rewards must have a procedural fair basis; therefore, assessment is an important supplement to the implementation of incentives. In reality, appraisal is often not the basis for incentives; on the contrary, an organization's promotion decisions profoundly affect the results of appraisals. Thirdly, the basis for the implementation of core incentives is the implicit promotion order constructed by the intensity of the relationship resources between grassroots civil servants inside and outside the system, while the marginal rewards are provided to the disadvantaged groups in the system as a balance. Therefore, there are inconsistencies between outstanding civil servants and promoters in a year, as well as inconsistencies between leaders' evaluation and the colleague evaluation of those who are promoted. Finally, the invisible promotion order reduces the effect of both core incentive and marginal incentive, which is summarized as “relational dissolution incentive”, and the current distribution-oriented system is strengthening the relational attribute of counties.
Compared with previous research on the promotion of grassroots civil servants, this paper has contributions in the following three aspects. Firstly, in the explanation of the promotion of grassroots civil servants, the key figures who affect the promotion are proposed, and the key people and the grassroots civil servants are connected by emotional or interest bonds. Secondly, the specific types of relationships that affect the promotion of grassroots civil servants are subdivided, that is, strong political relations, weak political but strong economic relations, and weak political and economic relationships, that is, the relationship is used as an analytical tool to discuss the promotion of civil servants. Thirdly, it clarifies the consequences of relational intervention in the promotion of civil servants, that is, “relational dissolution incentives”, including three different dissolution paths, namely, strong political relations replacing and even determining evaluation, strong economic but weak political relations weakening evaluation, and weak political and economic relations leading to incentive fail.