The authors argue that from a behavioral public administration perspective, public officials’ attitudes towards public evaluation are not rational, but instead biased and will affect their PSM. Using three survey experiments on 881 Chinese public officials, this study examines how public officials’ expected evaluation violation affects their PSM. The research finds that expected evaluation violation affects PSM through public officials’ competence frustration. Occupational identity strengthens the negative impact of expected evaluation violation on competence and frustration, while human-robot collaboration buffers the negative relationship. Our findings provide empirical evidence for cognitive bias studies and advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanism of how the public officials’ PSM is affected from the perspective of interaction.
