The provision of feedback is fundamental for promoting employee performance in modern organisations; however, little is known about how the quality of feedback affects performance. We report an experiment where subjects perform a real-effort task repeatedly in a flat-wage environment which varies the quality of feedback across treatments. In the baseline treatment, subjects receive no feedback about their rank in their group. In the two main treatments, feedback quality varies in that subjects know (“High-Quality Feedback”) or do not know (“Low-Quality Feedback”) their exact rank in their group. We show that the quality of feedback is an important driver of productivity. Average performance is significantly higher for high-quality feedback than for low-quality or no feedback, where no significant overall performance differences are observed. Our results have significant implications for designing and implementing cost-effective policies within organisations.

提供反馈是提高现代组织员工绩效的基础；然而，人们对反馈质量如何影响绩效知之甚少。我们报告了一项实验，其中受试者在固定工资环境中重复执行真正努力的任务，这会改变不同治疗的反馈质量。在基线治疗中，受试者没有收到关于他们在小组中排名的反馈。在两种主要的处理中，反馈质量因受试者知道（“高质量反馈”）或不知道（“低质量反馈”）他们在小组中的确切排名而有所不同。我们表明，反馈的质量是生产力的重要驱动力。高质量反馈的平均性能明显高于低质量或无反馈，后者没有观察到显着的整体性能差异。