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.

Performance evaluation practices have primarily been studied from the perspectives of firms and the employees being evaluated. We shift attention to supervisors and examine how two contemporary evaluation practices—multi-rater systems and calibration committees—reshape their role in evaluating employees. While supervisors traditionally bear primary responsibility for employee evaluations, these practices redistribute evaluative responsibility across multiple organizational actors, changing supervisors’ effort-related and psychological burden as well as their influence over evaluation outcomes. Using data from four survey waves, we find that both practices are positively associated with supervisors’ satisfaction with the performance evaluation process, but that these benefits vary with supervisors’ susceptibility to psychological burden and their residual claim in evaluation outcomes. Greater satisfaction with the evaluation process is, in turn, associated with lower turnover intentions. Overall, our findings show that contemporary performance evaluation practices not only affect how employees are evaluated but also reshape supervisors’ experience of a core managerial responsibility, with important implications for firms’ ability to retain managerial talent.

With potential evaluations widespread in practice, it is important to understand how these evaluations are formed. Drawing on proprietary data from a large European manufacturing firm, we examine the evaluation-specific informativeness of multi-rater ratings for the supervisor’s subjective evaluation of potential and performance. We predict and find that the supervisor’s own rating is informative for both subsequent potential and performance evaluations. Ratings by other members of the organization are incrementally informative for performance but not potential. For potential, we find that the source of the information matters: information associated with higher-ranked raters is incrementally more informative for potential evaluations than information associated with other sources. Further analyses indicate that the ratings of higher-ranked raters are incrementally informative for performance evaluations, while higher-ranked-rater representation on the rater panel is informative for potential. Our findings suggest that the informativeness of multi-rater information depends jointly on the evaluation objective and the organizational source of that information: performance-relevant information is distributed throughout the organization, whereas evaluating future-job suitability requires consideration of the source of that information. Firms should therefore align rater-panel compositions with the personnel judgment the performance management system is intended to support.