Performance feedback in organizational behavior management: A review

Performance feedback interventions have a long history of success as a means of enhancing productivity by modifying employee behavior. Although almost all feedback strategies appear quite simple and straightforward in their application, we have seen that they can differ along a number of important dimensions. Careful consideration of each dimension of feedback prior to implementation is likely to lead to increased numbers of succesful, cost-effective feedback programs in organizational settings. The present review provided a basis for making future distinctions between quite different forms of this behavioral intervention strategy. Greater specification of procedures will hopefully lead to replication of past research, comparisons of different types of feedback and ultimately the development of a more systematic technology. In addition, the traditional treatment of feedback as a reinforcer, i.e., a consequent stimulus, was considered and found insufficient to explain all effects upon employee behavior. A conceptual reanalysis of the effects of feedback was offered that included a delineation of the multiple antecedent stimulus functions of performance feedback interventions. This reinterpretation of feedback should allow OBM practitioners to enhance feedback procedures by measuring all effects upon worker behavior, not just those directly attributable to consequent stimulus functions of feedback procedures. © 1981 The Haworth Press.

Duke Scholars

Author John A. Fairbank Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychia ...