The Impact of Goals and Pay on Feedback-Seeking Behavior

Testing the influence of real-time performance feedback on employees in digital services

Purpose

While digital media changed the nature of communication in service contexts, often allowing customers to interact instantly with service providers, the implications and opportunities for managing service employees are widely unknown. This is surprising, given that service employees are an important determinant of service firms’ success. This article examines the effects of real-time performance feedback on employees’ service performance and investigates both how and under what conditions timely feedback encourages employees’ engagement.

Design/methodology/approach

Two experiments test the conceptual model and the proposed hypotheses. A field experiment uses real customer feedback gathered after interaction with the app-chat of a large telecommunications provider. It tests the effect of feedback timing on service employees’ performance and also examines the effect of feedback timing on their engagement. A subsequent scenario-based experiment then investigates the influence of selected moderators on the feedback timing–engagement relationship.

Findings

This article finds that real-time feedback leads to greater service performance than subsequent feedback. Furthermore, real-time feedback positively affects service employee engagement through the perceived controllability of the feedback and the service situation. Finally, feedback valence, task goals, individuals’ need for closure (NCL), and gender interact with feedback timing to influence employee engagement.

Originality/value

This research investigates the potential of real-time performance feedback for service firms, combines and extends a variety of literature streams, and provides recommendations for the future management of service employees.

From Empowerment to Multilevel Creativity: The Role of Employee Self-Perceived Status and Feedback-Seeking Climate

Employees’ perception of their intrateam status plays an important role in the leader–member interaction process. Combining relational fairness theory and status theory, the present study reveals how leadership empowerment behavior (LEB) affects employee and team creativity. Specifically, we propose that LEB may increase employee creativity by elevating employee self-perceived status and enhance team creativity through fostering a feedback-seeking climate in the team. Moreover, we propose that, at the team level, team status conflict moderates the relationship between LEB and feedback-seeking climate such that LEB is only positively related to feedback-seeking climate when status conflict is low but not when it is high. We further propose that team feedback-seeking climate also mediates the interactive effect of LEB and status conflict on team creativity. Results based on data collected from a sample of 84 teams with 392 employees supported our hypotheses. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and propose future research directions.