As we all know, giving employees appropriate performance feedback is the key to evaluating the effectiveness of leadership, and it is extremely important to guide employees in their personal development and improve organizational performance. Especially when employees fail to perform as expected, leaders are often required to provide negative performance feedback. However, previous studies have shown that although this kind of negative feedback can motivate employees to work harder, it is more likely to have adverse consequences such as reduced knowledge sharing, reduced self-efficacy, increased feelings of shame, negative social emotions, and emotional exhaustion. As a result, negative performance feedback has a double-edged effect on employees. So, does negative performance feedback always lead to negative reactions from employees? What can help employees avoid negative reactions to their leaders? In order to answer the above questions, Professor Zheng Xiaoming (corresponding author) from the Department of Leadership and Organizational Management of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. graduate Ni Dan (first author, Ph.D. 2015, now assistant professor at the School of Management, Sun Yat-sen University) published "Does negative performance" in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, an authoritative journal of organizational management psychology feedback always lead to negative responses? The role of trust in the leader".
First, this study points out that there are two problems that need to be solved urgently: first, the type and scope of responses generated by employees in the face of negative performance feedback from leaders are very limited, mainly focusing on the results of feedback, and ignoring the interpersonal function of negative performance feedback. Second, the existing research on the influence mechanism of negative performance feedback is not in-depth, and too much attention is paid to explaining how negative performance feedback affects employees' affective mechanisms. However, it is often difficult to fully picture the impact of negative performance feedback by ignoring the role of cognitive assessment, which is often processed through cognitive assessments, which are then elicit in triggering psychological and behavioral responses.
Therefore, Professor Zheng Xiaoming and his collaborators delved into when and how negative performance feedback can help employees avoid interpersonal anti-productive work behaviors towards leaders based on cognitive appraisal theory. According to cognitive assessment theory, not everyone interprets stressful events as threats. Whether or not an employee perceives a situation as stress depends largely on how they perceive and judge the leader. In fact, existing studies have shown that an individual's cognitive assessment of stressful situations depends heavily on trust. As a result, the authors suggest that employees who have a higher level of trust in their leaders tend to be more open about receiving, understanding, and dealing with negative performance feedback from their leaders. This answers the question that negative performance feedback doesn't always lead to negative employee reactions, and explains why some employees perform well in stressful situations. It can be found that trust in the leader is a key factor in this process. At the same time, cognitive assessment theory suggests that in a stressful situation, individuals will only develop corresponding emotional responses and coping behaviors after assessing whether the situation is beneficial. Based on this theory, the authors further propose that the perception of feedback quality will elicit an emotional response from employees, i.e., a higher level of feedback quality will reduce hostility towards the leader and consequently reduce interpersonal anti-productive work behavior towards the leader.
The hypothesis was tested through two experiments. First, the authors conducted a series of supplementary analyses based on survey data from central China to verify the robustness of the results. Then, to test the causal effect of the hypothesis, the authors designed a scenario-based experiment based on relevant data from Western countries. The results showed that when employees' trust in leaders was low (compared to higher), negative performance feedback had a negative impact on the quality of employees' perceived feedback. In addition, the quality of perceived feedback is negatively correlated with employees' hostility towards leaders, which in turn affects interpersonal anti-production work behaviors towards leaders.
The study made theoretical contributions to both performance feedback and cognitive assessment. First, the authors focus on employees' interpersonal responses to feedback providers (i.e., leaders) to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of negative performance feedback in the workplace. Secondly, this study analyzes the influence mechanism of negative performance feedback with the help of cognitive assessment theory, focuses on the perspective of cognitive assessment, and proposes that the impact of negative feedback on employees should first pass cognitive assessment, followed by emotional experience, and finally distant behavior. Third, the authors reveal a key contextual factor, i.e., employees' trust in their leaders, which compensates for the role of employees' judgments or perceptions of their leaders, which have been ignored in previous studies.
The research results of this paper also have important guiding significance for management practice. First, organizations have long emphasized the importance of performance feedback to improve employee performance, but existing studies have found that it can also lead to many negative outcomes, and this study reveals that when employees trust the leader, negative performance feedback may not lead to negative reactions from employees, so leaders can build trust with employees through an effective feedback process to solve the dilemma of negative feedback leading to negative outcomes. Second, the study validates the negative correlation between perceived feedback quality and hostility towards leaders, and the positive correlation between hostility towards leaders and interpersonal counterproductive work behavior towards leaders. This suggests that managers need to ensure that they are able to provide high-quality performance feedback to their employees, especially when managers provide negative performance feedback to employees, and that organizations can introduce training courses for managers to improve their ability to provide effective feedback. Finally, the study shows that in performance feedback interactions, employees are more likely to engage in interpersonal anti-productive work behaviors towards leaders when they feel hostile to their leaders, and to counter this possibility, organizations can introduce emotion management training for employees to help them better deal with emotional states at work, and can also work towards creating a friendly and open work atmosphere to alleviate employees' emotional stress.
研究成果：Does negative performance feedback always lead to negative responses? The role of trust in the leader
Author:
Ni Dan, Ph.D. 2015, is currently an assistant professor at the School of Management, Sun Yat-sen University
Zheng Xiaoming (corresponding author) is a professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Management, Tsinghua School of Economics and Management
发表期刊：Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology，2023
Source: Office of Scientific Research
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