Journal of Business and Psychology

, Volume 22, Issue 3, pp 191–207 | Cite as

Factors Influencing Employee Intentions to Provide Honest Upward Feedback Ratings

Article
First Online:

Abstract

Based on current research involving rater motivation, we examined several factors hypothesized to influence employee intentions to provide honest upward feedback. Survey data were collected from a demographically diverse sample of hospital employees (n = 203). In summary, we found empirical support for generalizing extant models of rater motivation to an upward feedback context: cynicism towards upper management and the upward feedback process, understanding upward feedback, and opportunity to observe their supervisors were the primary predictors of employee intentions to provide honest upward feedback ratings, mediated by the (a) extent to which employees perceived positive benefits would result from rating their supervisors honestly, (b) the extent to which employees feared retaliation by their supervisors, and (c) rater self-efficacy.

Keywords

Upward feedback Multisource feedback Multi-rater feedback Performance appraisal Rater motivation Rater participation Rater accuracy 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Tony Calabrese, Director of Psychology Services at Pine Grove Recovery Center, for his assistance in facilitating data collection. This article was based on Austin F. R. Smith’s dissertation under the supervision of Vincent J. Fortunato. The authors contributed equally to this article.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PsychologyUniversity of Southern MississippiHattiesburgUSA
  2. 2.Personnel Decisions InternationalNew YorkUSA
  3. 3.Department of PsychologyBoise State UniversityBoiseUSA
  4. 4.People Business LLCBoiseUSA

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