The work performance activities of the boards is the important foundation to realize effective corporate governance, and is also the intermediate hinge connecting governance structure and governance effectiveness. This paper provides an exploratory interpretation of the relationship between corporate governance and risk management performance from a perspective of work performance activities of audit committees, and empirically tests work performance activities, influencing factors and potential performance of audit committees based on listed companies on the main board of A-share market from 2009 to 2011. It comes to the results as follows: firstly, as a whole, the work performance activities of audit committees of Chinese listed companies make people worried, and only less than forty percent of their work performance activities is both credible and active, so the work performance status should be urgently improved;secondly,companies with high-level ownership concentration have poorer quality of work performance of audit committees, and audit committees are active in big companies or companies with low growth and high debt risks; thirdly,when the work performance activities of audit committees are credible and active, their companies have lower performance fluctuations; when the credibility of work performance of audit committees is lower, their companies which appear to be diligent have bigger performance fluctuations instead; when work performance of audit committees is credible but has lower liveness, the correlation between work performance activities and performance fluctuations is not robust. The conclusions above-mentioned reveal prudential governance can help to reduce corporate risks and urge prudential performance, and only true diligence, rather than apparent diligence,is the base of effective governance. It needs to further study prudential governance mechanisms at the level of the board of directors.