Breaking Bureaucratic Ties with Algorithms: How AI-Driven Incentive Decisions Foster Job Well-Being Among Chinese Civil Servants

The final analytical sample comprised 382 participants with complete and valid data, corresponding to an overall effective response rate of 83.8%. Demographically, the sample included 55.2% females, with a mean age of 33.2 years (SD = 8.10). The vast majority (92.1%) held a bachelor’s degree.

Professionally, 59.2% were classified under the comprehensive management track, and 83.8% occupied positions at the section-member rank or higher. Participants reported an average job tenure of 8.9 years (SD = 7.60).In the critical incident study, participants were initially recruited from MPA program at a large public university in Beijing, China, yielding 31 incumbent civil servants who served as seeds for a snowball sampling procedure.

This recruitment strategy ultimately engaged 700 civil servants. Of these responses, 90 failed the attention check (“Please select Disagree”). Thus, the final sample was 610. 50.8% were female, with an average age falling within the 31–35 years bracket (SD = 1.25), 21.5% held a postgraduate degree, and 41.8% had accumulated more than five years of tenure in government service.