Invites you to a

Experimental economics seminar presented by

Boon Han Koh

University of East Anglia

The signals we give: Performance feedback, gender, and competition

Co-authors:

Alexander Coutts (York University)

Zahra Murad (University of Portsmouth)

Tuesday 11 October

12.00pm – 1.00pm

Abstract: Feedback provision is a powerful tool that organizations have available to improve worker performance, spark individual growth, and influence career development. Despite its importance, managers have often been found to avoid providing feedback to their workers. Evidence using observation data also suggests that women tend to receive vaguer feedback than men (Correll and Simard, 2016). We use a stylized online experiment to causally examine how managers provide feedback to workers, whether its provision differs based on the worker’s gender, and how feedback impacts the gender competition gap. Workers are asked to choose whether they would like to enter a tournament, and managers are given the opportunity to provide performance feedback to them. Specifically, managers see a noisy signal about their worker’s performance and choose whether to convey: (1) exactly the signal they received, or (2) a vaguer signal. Depending on the treatment assignment, workers either receive the manager’s feedback after making their competition choice (thus rendering the information non-instrumental), or they receive the feedback before making their competition choice (hence, feedback is instrumental to them). Overall, we find that managers withhold a substantial amount of information, even when feedback is positive. Hence, a significant proportion of managers withhold praise. Moreover, when feedback is non-instrumental, women are more likely than men to receive vague feedback when they perform poorly. On the other hand, when feedback is instrumental, male managers tend to hold back bad news from men and good news from women. Finally, we do not observe gender differences in feedback provision when feedback is instrumental. Nonetheless, the gender competition gap increases after feedback. This is driven by gender differences in how men and women respond to negative feedback. Specifically, men are more likely to ignore negative instrumental feedback than women.

For further information contact: Experimental economics seminar series coordinator Dr Jonathan Levy (jonathan.levy@sydney.edu.au)

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