The Use Of Priority Information In Performance Feedback

To provide the most value to an organization, individuals must focus efforts on those outputs that have maximum value to the organization. However, the realities of the workplace are that information about performance and how individuals can add value to an organization is complex; that is, determining which activities to focus on is a fairly complex task because such information is nonlinear, whereby the importance of a certain activity may change depending on the level of performance at any given time. This article empirically examines whether providing complex, nonlinear feedback that reflects the complexities of the real world will result in a change in work outputs that reflect these nonlinearities. This article assesses whether employees can and do use complex feedback that reflects the complexity of the real world in the intended ways. In addition, this article examines whether individuals use feedback that includes priority information beyond feedback that reports on simple relative importance. Data were analyzed from 9 work units for time periods averaging a little over a year. Results indicate that, as predicted, when individuals have access to both complex, nonlinear priority information and simple, linear relative importance information, individuals can and do use the complex data in the intended way. Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc