The Performance Effects of Giving Front-Line Employees Direct Access to Performance Data and Thereby Limiting the Supervisor’s Feedback-Intermediation Role: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper examines how giving front-line employees direct access to their performance data affects performance. To explore that impact, we conducted a field experiment at a service organization that made employees’ daily time-use analytics—previously available only to supervisors—simultaneously available to the employees themselves. We find, compared with the preintervention mean value, a significant treatment effect (an 11% decrease) in nonproductive time relative to the control group. That time, however, flows not strictly to productive (revenue-generating) activities but largely to the most convenient outlets, suggesting—as supported by our qualitative evidence—that data transparency on average shifted behavior more toward avoiding nonproductive activities than toward approaching productive activities. (As one participant observed, it led people to “conform, not excel.”) We examine three relational factors we believed, based on prior feedback research, could moderate the performance effect: perceived supervisor support, social comparison orientation, and work motivation type. Performance improvements are greater for employees who perceived their supervisors as less supportive and for those with low intrinsic motivation or high extrinsic motivation; we fail to find a moderating effect of social comparison orientation. Therefore, although we identify the avoidance (although not approach) value of transparent performance data, our results also tell a nuanced story about the supervisor’s optimal role in delivering feedback: The ability to shift people away from “bad” and toward other uses of time depends on the employee’s perception of supervisor quality and the employee’s motivation type. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, organizations. Funding: We are grateful to the Division of Research and Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School and the USC Marshall School of Business for funding this research. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02395 .