Paternalism in the Performance Context: Evaluators Who Feel Social Pressure to Avoid Exhibiting Prejudice Deliver More Inflated Performance Feedback to Women

Performance feedback is critical to employees’ development and advancement in organizations, but a variety of factors can compromise its integrity. In the current work, we develop a model proposing that feedback providers who feel social pressure to avoid exhibiting prejudice might overcorrect when delivering performance feedback to women, leading them to handle women with “velvet gloves” and deliver inflated performance feedback (i.e., omitting negative performance aspects and/or emphasizing positive performance aspects). In study 1, we explore the relationship between feedback-recipient gender and the nature of feedback in a naturalistic setting, finding that music critics at Rolling Stone provide more positive written reviews of albums by women musicians relative to men musicians, beyond what would be expected based on album star rating. In study 2, we experimentally test our full model, finding that feedback providers who feel social pressure to avoid exhibiting prejudice towards women express greater protective paternalism (i.e., feelings of protectiveness) when preparing to deliver feedback to a woman. Protective paternalism, in turn, predicts the delivery of more inflated performance feedback. In a supplementary study, we demonstrate that feedback providers who criticize women’s work performance are perceived as more prejudiced and less communal than those who criticize men’s performance, thereby highlighting a reason why individuals succumb to social pressures and deliver inflated feedback. Taken together, our results shed light on why and when women receive less developmental feedback than men, thereby elucidating a novel and counterintuitive mechanism by which gender inequities are maintained in organizations.