Negative Feedback as Performance Conversations: An Event Systems Perspective

Abstract

Although feedback is intended to facilitate employee effectiveness, negative feedback sometimes impedes, rather than improves, employee outcomes. We draw from Event Systems Theory to develop a conceptual model that identifies how event-based characteristics of negative feedback (i.e., novelty, disruption, and criticality) relate to employee effectiveness (i.e., work goal progress, work withdrawal, and interpersonal helping) via two mechanisms—felt competence and cognitive depletion. Results from a 10-week event sampling study were generally supportive of our theory, indicating that felt competence and cognitive depletion play key roles in mediating the effects of event-based negative feedback characteristics on employee outcomes. These findings indicate that specific, event-based characteristics of negative feedback play an important role in explaining employee reactions to such feedback, determining whether it facilitates (vs. hinders) employee effectiveness.