How Feedback Seek Relates to Proximal Outcomes: A Closer Look at the Event Level

Whether feedback seeking benefits employees’ job performance is a critical issue that received mixed results in the extant literature (Anseel et al., 2015). The effectiveness of feedback seeking may depend on various components of the event. Unfortunately, previous research has tended to adopt a between-person-level design that may mask relationships between event features and employees’ outcomes. The present research adopted an event-centered approach and considered the intermediate processes of feedback seeking. Research findings from 441 feedback-seeking events and 78 employees revealed that the quality of feedback response was related to task motivation experienced the following day through task-processes, and was related to job uncertainty through meta-processes. Furthermore, feedback-seeking motives have the moderating effects in these processes. Specifically, instrumental motive strengthened the indirect effect of quality of feedback response on task motivation through task-processes, and impression management motive weakened this conditional mediation effect such that the indirect effect was more positive when people sought feedback for the combination of high instrumental motive and low impression management motive than for the combination of high instrumental motive and high impression management motive. Moreover, the quality of feedback response influences the experienced job uncertainty through meta-processes only when people seek feedback with a high instrumental motive.