# Budgetary participation and organizational performance in Chinese public hospitals: facilitation or inhibition?

## TL;DR

This study examines how budget participation affects the performance of public hospitals in China, finding positive links with non-healthcare performance and self-efficacy.

## Contribution

The paper introduces Latour’s Actor-Network Theory to hospital budgeting and combines qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis.

## Key findings

- Budget participation is positively correlated with non-healthcare performance.
- Subjectively, budget participation correlates with planning and communication self-efficacy.
- Budget participation influences non-healthcare performance through self-efficacy factors.

## Abstract

Against the backdrop of deepening China’s medical and health system reform, public hospitals are responsible for improving modern hospital management systems. This article aimed to understand whether and how public hospital budget participation affects organizational performance in China.

Based on the novel insights of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and self-efficiency theory, this article combines qualitative and quantitative research methods. In the qualitative research, this article used Grounded Theory and interviewed ten financial heads of public hospitals. In quantitative research, this article used an empirical research method and distributed 168 questionnaires, of which 164 valid responses were collected for analysis.

This article reaches the following conclusions: (1) There is a positive correlation between budget participation and non-healthcare performance. (2) At the objective level, there was no significant correlation between budget participation and self-efficacy. From a subjective perspective, budget participation, planning self-efficacy, and interpersonal communication and coordination self-efficacy were significantly and positively correlated. (3) Budget participation could have an effect on NHP through planning self-efficacy, interpersonal communication and coordination self-efficacy The innovations of this article are: firstly, this article reasonably confirms the positive relationship between budget participation and organizational performance of public hospitals in China, providing useful references or subsequent research and other national and regional studies. Second, it analyzes the impact of budget participation on organizational performance based on a new perspective of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. This article is among the first to apply ANT in the context of hospital budgeting, offering novel theoretical insights. Finally, it uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the data.