Contrary to traditional supply-driven feedback systems, in demand-driven feedback sys-tems, employees receive performance feedback only upon request. The feedback request and the feedback employees receive provide information to supervisors, who can use this information when subjectively evaluating employee performance and potential. Drawing upon the feedback-seeking literature, I predict that high performers are more likely to re-quest feedback in a demand-driven feedback system. I further predict that the feedback is informative for evaluations of performance, and 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 firms use demand-driven feedback systems as an additional source of information for evaluation and resource allocation purposes. However, since very few employees request feedback, such systems are likely not effective in supporting the performance development of most employees, and low performers in particular.

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.