Performance Feedback Type and Employees' Subsequent Willingness to Help Other Employees

What is it about?

Our study highlights a trade-off that firms face between motivating employees to provide productive effort and enhancing their willingness to help others. Specifically, while providing RPI can motivate employees to provide more productive output, it could also have the unanticipated effect of making some employees (i.e., those who are told that they performed better than others) less willing to subsequently help other employees, even those against whom they were not competing. Our results should be of particular interest to managers and management accountants, who are typically responsible for the design and implementation of their company's feedback and compensation systems. More broadly, our results highlight the importance of making decisions about the type of performance feedback to provide employees holistically rather than in isolation; that is, management should consider that the performance feedback provided for one task might alter behavior on unrelated tasks with a different co-workers.

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