Relative Performance Feedback: Gendered Preferences and Asymmetric Costs

Many organizations provide employees with relative performance feedback, which informs them of how they perform compared to other employees. The current research shows that such feedback is less desirable and more emotionally costly for women than for men. We show that compared to men, women are more averse than men to receiving relative performance feedback. Drawing on socialization theory and gender differences in competitiveness, we predict and find that these gendered feedback preferences are explained by women’s greater anxiety about being evaluated in comparative terms. Using both within- and between-participant designs, we further rule out the alternative explanations that the observed effects are due to gender differences in actual performance, performance expectations, preferences for non-relative feedback, or generalized feedback anxiety. Overall, these findings suggest that a widely used method of feedback inflicts disproportionally more anxiety on women, which may interfere with the learning and development that feedback aims to facilitate.