In demand-driven feedback systems, employees receive performance feedback only upon request, and the feedback employees receive from other employees is commonly shared with the supervisor. In this study, I investigate which employees choose to provide their supervisor with evaluation-relevant information about themselves by requesting feedback, and how this information is used by supervisors in their subjective evaluations of employees. I predict that high performers are more likely to request feedback in a demand-driven feedback system, and that the feedback is informative for evaluations of performance while the feedback request is informative for evaluations of potential. Using data from a large European company, I find support for these predictions. My results suggest that demand-driven feedback systems can be used as an additional source of information for evaluation and resource allocation purposes. However, they may not be effective in supporting the performance development of most employees and low performers in particular when feedback is shared with evaluators.

With the widespread use of narrative feedback in companies, understanding how such feedback can be valuable for employee performance improvement is important. Drawing on proprietary data from an e-commerce company, we investigate the role of language specificity and causality – two key language characteristics relevant to self-regulation and learning. Our findings suggest that the effects of specificity and causality differ depending on whether the feedback refers to strengths or weaknesses. Specifically, employees are more likely to improve when they receive more specific narrative feedback on their strengths, consistent with employees engaging in more systematic exploration when feedback refers to many desirable behaviors. In contrast, we find that increases in the specificity of narrative feedback on weaknesses can have negative performance consequences, which aligns with unsystematic exploration when the feedback refers to many undesirable behaviors. Furthermore, in line with employees gaining a better understanding of why certain behaviors were undesirable, employees are more likely to improve when narrative feedback on their weaknesses contains a higher degree of language causality. In additional analyses, we find evidence consistent with supervisor characteristics moderating the relation between language causality and employee performance improvement. Overall, this study provides novel empirical insights into the types and characteristics that make feedback valuable.

We investigate the effect of overproduction on employment- and safety-related organizational misconduct. We predict that overproduction puts employees under pressure, who may respond by “cutting corners” and increasing their workload, resulting in higher organizational misconduct. We further predict that this might lead to changes in social norms within the organization over time, resulting in an increase of future misconduct and a slippery slope, i.e., an increase of the average severity of future misconduct. Controlling for previous levels of misconduct, we find effects consistent with our predictions for both the prevalence and severity of future misconduct. We also find evidence for the presence of a slippery slope. In additional analyses, we show results for situations in which overproduction pressure may have a differential effect on social norms.