What’s Gender Got to Do with It? An Empirical Examination of Gender-based Workplace Feedback and Performance

Abstract

Real-time feedback applications are quickly replacing traditional annual reviews, enabling managers to address positive and negative behaviors soon after they occur efficiently, and on an ongoing basis. Given the increasing use of real-time feedback, questions about the reviews’ fairness warrant exploration. Do implicit and explicit gender biases play a role in the fairness and quality of reviews? Do gendered patterns in feedback inadvertently affect how employees develop and advance throughout their careers? Despite the importance of these questions, research on real-time feedback applications' role in employee performance is limited. This study is among the first to explore how men and women use performance feedback applications in business settings in managerial and non-managerial job roles. It applies quantitative and qualitative content analysis to proprietary managerial workplace feedback gathered over two years through a commercially available application to specifically examine gender-based differences in feedback. Interestingly, we find that male raters provide harsher rating scores and shorter, lower-quality comments than female raters when giving feedback to both male and female employees. Moreover, this phenomenon is even more pronounced when raters are managers. Lastly, our research also shows that employees’ work performance improvement is directly associated with the gender-affected rating results they receive. To address the endogeneity issues, we use identification approaches such as subsample analysis and instrumental variable method. Our managerial insights, based on our results, will help organizational leaders understand the dynamics and behaviors involved in delivering and receiving real-time feedback for effectively implementing these applications to serve their organizations best and address any issues caused by underlying gender dynamics.

Keywords: real-time feedback, performance appraisals, mobile application, rating feedback, seeking feedback, business technology, managerial feedback, gendered workplace feedback, gender in the workplace