The Secret Afterlife of Feedback Interventions: How Social Sharing of Feedback Affects Performance

When do people share personal feedback with others and what are the consequences of such feedback-sharing behavior? Performance feedback has typically been conceptualized as a dyadic exchange between a feedback giver and recipient. Absent from the literature is the recognition that feedback recipients may decide to share the personal feedback they receive with other parties beyond the feedback dyad. Drawing on research on social sharing of emotions and information, I develop a preliminary level-of-processing model of individuals' motives for sharing feedback. I propose that the intensity of emotional arousal provoked by feedback interventions triggers the activation of different motives driving the decision to share feedback or not. The interplay between those motives will also determine the tactics (i.c., transmitting, filtering, framing) used in sharing feedback. In turn, these feedback-sharing tactics may trigger a set of responses that may not only help or hurt the performance of the initial feedback recipient but also the performance of the target of feedback sharing.