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Executive Overview
Performance feedback is an important part of many organizational interventions. Managers typically assume that providing employees with feedback about their performance makes it more likely that performance on the job will be improved. Despite the prevalence of feedback mechanisms in management interventions, however, feedback is not always as effective as is typically assumed. In this article, we present specific conditions under which feedback might be less effective. or even harmful. We then discuss the implications of our results and model for designing of interventions aimed at improving performance, and focus more narrowly on 360-degree appraisal systems. After arguing that these systems typically have design characteristics that reduce effectiveness, we conclude with recommendations for improving their effectiveness. We also emphasize the need for systematic evaluations of feedback interventions.
Everyone is interested in performance feedbackknowing how well he or she is performing some task. When employees do not receive feedback from their job, they will seek it on their own.1 Feedback is also seen as an important source of motivating potential on the job and its presence has been proposed to lead to increased satisfaction and motivation.2 Furthermore, most decision-making models, and many motivational models, include a feedback loop to indicate that individuals learn from the outcomes of their decisions or behavior. Therefore, it would be safe to say that, for many scholars and practitioners in the field of management, the effectiveness of feedback for improving performance is essentially a given. We generally assume that outcomes such as job performance will improve as a result of feedback, especially when compared with the performance of employees who receive no such feedback. But actual data concerning the effectiveness of feedback is fairly limited. Furthermore, the models available for explaining how feedback works are rather narrow, and often cannot be reconciled with what we do know about feedback's effects. Given this dearth of information, it is possible that a poorly implemented feedback program could actually hurt, rather than help performance. Therefore, it is critical that we study the effectiveness of feedback in order to better understand how well it works, and develop some models to help predict when feedback will have any effect on subsequent performance.
A recent article we published3 included a review of the literature...