Feedback Management Strategies in Perceived Good and Poor Performance: The Role of Source Attributes and Recipient’s Personality Disposition

Employees seek feedback so as to gather or pass important information, which is required to enhance employees ’ contribution to organisational productivity, and thus, likely to lead to improved benefits for the employees. These feedbacks may be sought in situations where performance outcome is known or unknown. The current study is aimed at determining how source attributes and recipients ’ personality disposition effect the adoption of the various feedback strategies, when employee’s perceive their performance as either good or poor; an area of inquiry that has not been covered by past studies. Using 400 participants, drawn from two organisations in Lagos, Nigeria, and hierarchical multiple regression analyses, the study identified significant direct and interactive effects of source expertise, reward power, relationship with recipients, and recipients ’ self esteem on the feedback strategies used in perceived good or poor performance. The study identified the strategic role of recipient’s self esteem, and his/her relationship with the feedback source in the identified relationships. The implications of these results and a proposed direction for future studies are discussed