From Words to Actions: The Impact of Specificity and Causality in Narrative Feedback on Employee Performance Improvement Des paroles aux actes : incidence de la spécificité et de la causalité dans la rétroaction narrative sur l'amélioration du rendement des employés

Abstract

With the widespread use of narrative feedback in companies, understanding how such feedback can be valuable for employee performance improvement is important. Drawing on proprietary data from an e-commerce company, we investigate the role of specificity and causality—two key language characteristics for self-regulation and learning. Our findings suggest that neither specificity nor causality is always beneficial; instead, their effects depend on whether the feedback refers to strengths or weaknesses. Specifically, employees are more likely to improve when they receive more specific narrative feedback on their strengths, consistent with employees engaging in more systematic exploration when feedback provides concrete references to desirable behaviors. In contrast, we find that increases in the specificity of narrative feedback on weaknesses can have negative performance consequences, as employees who are confronted with many specific examples of undesirable behaviors may attempt too many behavioral changes at once, undermining learning and improvement. Furthermore, employees are more likely to improve when feedback on their weaknesses uses more causal language, suggesting that explanations of why certain behaviors were ineffective help employees understand and correct those behaviors. Our study informs HR leaders, supervisors, and experts responsible for designing management control systems by showing that narrative feedback should be specific when describing strengths, but more selective and richer in causal explanations when addressing weaknesses.