Multilevel Perspective on Feedback Research: Feedback Exchange and the Role of Contextual Factors

Feedback is an integral part of organizational life and a critical enabler for employee development and performance. Past research found that individual's attitudes towards feedback and their likelihood to give and seek feedback is caused by and depends on the multilevel factors, namely those at the individual, team and organizational levels (e.g., Anseel et al., 2015; Finkelstein et al., 2017; Sijbom et al., 2018). However, recently scholars point out that there is still relatively little research into team and, particularly, organizational level factors that shape feedback behaviors and its effect on performance, rending further investigations into this research area necessary (e.g., Mockeviciute et al., 2022; Schleicher et al., 2018). This symposium is designed to advance organizational research by building a deeper, multilevel understanding of how factors at the individual, team, and organizational levels, and their interactions shape individual's attitudes and reactions towards feedback, as well as their feedback seeking and giving behaviors. Specifically, this symposium introduces most recent research and further advances scholarly discussion on feedback attitudes, behaviors, and feedback context by showcasing four cutting-edge studies. To achieve this goal, this symposium features four papers. The first two papers focus on individuals' attitudes and reactions towards feedback. Specifically, the first paper presents a meta-analysis on the literature on individual's attitudes towards feedback, i.e., feedback orientation, and its relationships with feedback seeking behavior and other variables. The second paper, using an experimental research design, investigates how an individual level factor, such as gender, shapes one's reactions to feedback. In turn, the third and the fourth papers focus on the dyadic and organization level influences on one's feedback seeking and feedback giving behaviors. Specifically, the third paper presents a scale development to measure organizational feedback norms and subsequently investigates to what extent, how, and under what conditions these perceived organizational feedback norms shape employee's feedback seeking behaviors. Thereby this paper focuses on the organizational level factors and their interaction with individual level factors in shaping one's feedback seeking behavior. Similarly, the fourth paper investigates how social relationships between feedback givers and recipients affect feedback giving behavior using a longitudinal research design, thereby contributing to a better understanding on how dyadic level factor shapes one's likelihood to give feedback. Following the presentations, prof. Dr. Frederik Anseel (UNSW Sydney) will synthesize the symposium papers and facilitate an interactive discussion on the current state of research. With this symposium we aim to broaden the understanding of the multilevel factors that shape feedback attitudes and behaviors at work, as well as develop new avenues and possibilities for future research in this field. Taken together, these papers will provide important insights for practitioners and scholars in the interrelated disciplines such as human resource (HR), organizational behavior (OB), and managerial and organizational cognition (MOC), on the multilevel factors that affect individual's feedback attitudes and behaviors at work.