The Signals We Give: Performance Feedback, Gender, and Competition

Feedback is vital for growth and learning, yet anecdotal evidence suggests people often hesitate to provide it, and its provision may be shaped by asymmetries and gender-related biases. We study feedback provision across variations in the nature of performance signals, their instrumental value, and the recipient’s gender. We find that a surprising degree of both positive and negative feedback is withheld, with a follow-up experiment suggesting that advisors’ feedback decisions are driven mainly by transparency- and duty-related considerations, or, to a lesser extent, are motivated by self-serving reasons. Additionally, when initial performance signals are vague, advisors are more likely to withhold noninstrumental negative than positive feedback—an effect we conjecture may be stemming from the lower psychological cost of lying (by omission) under uncertainty. Suggestive evidence shows the difference is more pronounced for female recipients, and exploratory analysis traces this to stronger ego-protective concern by advisors for women than for men.

This paper was accepted by Marie Claire Villeval, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This study was funded by the British Academy [Grant SRG1920/100428], the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology [FCT Grant PTDC/EGE-ECO/5020/2021], the University of Exeter Business School, and the Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth. The study was preregistered on the American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials (No. AEARCTR-0006966), and it was approved by the Scientific Council of Nova School of Business and Economics and the Research Ethics Committees of both the University of East Anglia (0347) and the University of Exeter (8317399).

Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05001.