I investigate how demand-driven feedback affects evaluations of employee performance and potential. Contrary to traditional supply-driven feedback systems, in demand-driven feedback systems, employees receive performance feedback only upon request. The feedback request and the feedback are visible to evaluators, who can use this additional information in their evaluations of employee performance and potential. Using data from a European multinational organization, I predict and find that high performers self-select into requesting feedback. I find that the feedback request is mainly informative for evaluations of potential, while the feedback rating is mainly informative for evaluations of performance. In additional analyses, I find that the request is used in promotion and promotion planning decisions, but how the feedback request and feedback rating are used differs by employee gender.

This paper investigates how narrative feedback affects employee performance. We build on affective events and cognitive self-regulation theory to investigate the effects of three narrative feedback message characteristics (i.e., valence, specificity, and causal language use) on employees’ performance improvements. Using archival data from a European e-commerce company, we find that receiving feedback with a negative valence can decrease the likelihood of performance improvements. Furthermore, we find that while higher specificity in feedback on strengths and higher causal language use in feedback on weaknesses can positively affect performance improvement, higher specificity in feedback on weaknesses and causal language use in feedback on strengths can have adverse effects. In additional analyses, we show differing effects of narrative feedback for employees who receive positive or negative feedback surprises. These findings advance our understanding of whether and how narrative feedback can be valuable for employee development.

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.