Feedback as a Risk or an Opportunity: How Organizational Context Shapes Negative Feedback Perception

Answering a growing call from researchers to investigate the context of feedback in organizations, i.e., organizational factors that can potentially affect how feedback is given and received within the organization, we conduct a qualitative study across three organizations to explore how organizational characteristics shape employees’ perceptions towards negative feedback. We find that three organizational characteristics shape employees’ perceptions towards negative feedback: accountability for performance, feedback reinforcement, and relational norm of politeness. We discover how the interplay between these organizational characteristics shapes individual perception of negative feedback as a risk of damaging relationships or as an opportunity to improve performance. Specifically, we find that feedback reinforcement alone is not sufficient to outweigh the perception of negative feedback as a risk to relationships in organizations where individuals perceive the relational norm of high politeness with each other and low accountability for performance. With this, we contribute to the literature on negative feedback and the context of feedback by empirically identifying how organizational characteristics coexist to shape employees’ perceptions towards negative feedback, which helps explain the wide heterogeneity in the way employees give feedback across organizations.