Publications

Educators

Research Summary

Personal Development and Interpersonal Feedback

Enabling individual development and learning are key to enabling organizational success as well as employee satisfaction and engagement. Many organizational approaches to employee development visualize feedback processes as mechanisms for illuminating individual... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Personal Development

Summer 2017
Article

Performance Feedback in Competitive Product Development

By: Daniel P. Gross

Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This article introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of 4,294 commercial logo design tournaments, I... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Evaluation; Tournaments; Innovation; Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives; Rank and Position; Product Development; Learning

April 2025
Article

Gender and Preferences for Performance Feedback

By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman and David Klinowski

Across multiple studies, we investigate whether there are gender differences in preferences for receiving performance feedback. We vary many features of the feedback context: whether the performance task is a cognitive test or a mock interview, whether the feedback is... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Gender; Cognition and Thinking; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior

December 2022
Article

'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback

By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer E. Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino

People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces.... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Helping; Prosocial Behavior; Misprediction; Relationships; Interpersonal Communication; Perspective

September 20, 2019
Editorial

Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback

By: Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, Ariella S. Kristal and A.V. Whillans

Conventional wisdom says you should ask your colleagues for feedback. However, research suggests that feedback often has no (or even a negative) impact on our performance. This is because the feedback we receive is often too vague—it fails to highlight what we can... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Advice; Advice Seeking; Feedback Culture; Advice Taking; Interpersonal Communication

2017
Working Paper

Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks

By: Paul Green Jr., Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats

Many organizations employ interpersonal feedback processes as a structured means of informing and motivating employee improvement. Ample evidence suggests that these feedback processes are largely ineffective, and despite a wealth of prescriptive literature, these... View Details

Keywords: Developmental Feedback; Self-concept; Positive Illusions; Social Network; Threat; Identity; Social and Collaborative Networks; Behavior; Performance; Social Media

SSRN

2021
Working Paper

'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback

By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino

People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces.... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Helping; Prosocial Behavior; Relationships; Social Psychology; Theory; Perception

2021
Working Paper

Soliciting Advice Rather Than Feedback Yields More Developmental, Critical, and Actionable Input

By: Hayley Blunden, Jaewon Yoon, Ariella S. Kristal and Ashley V. Whillans

Asking for feedback is a popular way to solicit third-party input at work. However, feedback seeking is only weakly related to performance, and employees often report that the feedback that they receive is unhelpful. Addressing this discrepancy, across six studies... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Advice; Personal Development; Future Focus; Evaluative Mindset; Performance; Personal Development and Career

September 1982 (Revised March 1989)
Background Note

Managing Interpersonal Feedback

Provides a discussion of both the importance and some possible pitfalls that may be encountered when one tries to talk candidly with others about their behavior on the job. View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Performance Evaluation

Educators

December 2009
Article

Closing the Customer Feedback Loop

By: Rob Markey, Fred Reichheld and Andreas Dullweber

Realizing that customer retention is more critical than ever, companies have ramped up their efforts to listen to customers. But many struggle to convert their findings into practical prescriptions for customer-facing employees. Some companies are addressing that... View Details

Keywords: Customer Centric Initiative; Customer Satisfaction; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain

Article

The Errors of Experts: When Expertise Hinders Effective Provision and Seeking of Advice and Feedback

By: Ting Zhang, Kelly Harrington and Elad Sherf

To be effective, experts need to simultaneously develop others (i.e. provide advice and feedback to novices) and advance their own learning (i.e. seek and incorporate advice and feedback from others). However, expertise, and the state of efficacy associated with it,... View Details

Keywords: Expertise; Self-efficacy; Feedback; Perspective Taking; Cognitive Entrenchment; Interpersonal Communication

July 2012
Supplement

Feedback and Coaching Workshop

By: Joshua D. Margolis and Anthony Mayo

December 2015
Case

Difficult Conversations and Dealing with Challenging Situations at Work: The Friend Who Asked for Feedback

By: Boris Groysberg and Ann Leamon

Keywords: Feedback; Organization Behavior; Interpersonal Communication; Organizations

Educators

Forthcoming
Article

Eliciting Advice Instead of Feedback Improves Developmental Input

By: Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Jaewon Yoon, Hannah Burd, Georgina Bremner and Michael Yeomans

Most organizations encourage employees to provide feedback to one another to support learning, personal growth, and career advancement. However, employee feedback often fails to improve performance because it lacks concrete, specific guidance. We provide a temporal... View Details

2018
Chapter

The Power of Accepting Feedback

By: Hubert Joly

July 2012
Teaching Note

Feedback and Coaching Workshop (TN)

By: Joshua D. Margolis and Anthony J. Mayo