When Is Faculty Pay-for-Performance Perceived as Effective? A Configurational Study of Organizational Discretion Across Chinese Public University Colleges

Faculty pay-for-performance (PFP) is often evaluated primarily in terms of incentive design, yet its implementation also depends on the authority, resources, and organizational complexity of the academic units that enact it. This study examines how managerial discretion, financial discretion, implementation satisfaction, and college size combine in configurations associated with administrators’ assessments of faculty PFP. Evidence was drawn from 22 semi-structured interviews with college-level administrators and university-level administrators across 19 colleges in three Chinese public universities, supplemented by institutional policy documents. Qualitative thematic analysis identified the relevant organizational conditions, followed by fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of the 18 colleges with complete data. The results reveal three configurations associated with high perceived effectiveness and one associated with its absence, demonstrating that no single level of managerial or financial discretion is uniformly effective. Instead, favorable assessments arose through different alignments of discretion, implementation satisfaction, and organizational size. Conversely, high managerial discretion combined with limited financial discretion, low implementation satisfaction, and smaller college size was associated with the absence of high perceived effectiveness. By conceptualizing discretion as multidimensional and configurational, the study helps explain why formally similar faculty-performance policies may be perceived differently across academic units and provides an empirical baseline and organizational framework for evaluating subsequent reforms in Chinese higher education.