Project: Unraveling the manager’s role in feedback: the impact of feedback on the well-being and performance of employees and their managers.

2021-11-01 – 2025-10-31

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly investing in the well-being and performance of their employees. Hereby, they recognize that feedback, provided by the manager, plays a crucial role. This claim is supported by empirical evidence, which shows that feedback greatly impacts employees’ well-being and performance. However, recent literature critiques this employee-sided dominance within current existing feedback research. Thus, in order to make fundamental progress in the field, we build on recent calls from the literature to also consider the manager's perspective. As such, we identify two main research gaps, which are (1) how do individual differences among managers impact their (de)motivating feedback-giving behavior, which in turn impacts employees’ well-being and performance; and (2) how does providing feedback impact the well-being of the managers themselves. More specifically, in our first research objective, we will explore how managers’ goal orientation impacts employees’ employability (study 1) and burnout (study 2) by providing either motivating (e.g. focus on learning) or demotivating (e.g. comparison with others) feedback. In our second research objective, we will investigate how and when providing continuous feedback impacts managers’ occupational stress (study 3) and work engagement (study 4).