This reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

It seems like in the case of employees at a company, just knowing that a parameter is being measured can result in it implicitly becoming a target even when there is no explicit focus on it (especially if it is the only or one of a small number of metrics that is discussed).

I have observed that in general most humans are very bad at considering the incentives created by rules and rewards they impose or seek to impose.