What the Research Has to Say about Feedback

A surprising share of feedback makes performance worse, not better.

This isn't pessimism—it's what the data shows.

In 1996, psychologists Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi published what remains the most comprehensive analysis of feedback effectiveness ever conducted. They examined 607 effect sizes across 131 studies involving over 12,000 participants. The question was simple: does feedback improve performance?

The answer was complicated.

On average, feedback had a moderate positive effect. But here's what made headlines in research circles: about one-third of feedback interventions actually decreased performance. Not neutral. Worse.

For decades, we've operated on the assumption that more feedback is better—that the path to high performance runs through frequent input from managers, peers, and systems. The research tells a different story.

Why Feedback Backfires

Think about your own experience. You've probably received feedback that motivated you to improve, and feedback that made you defensive, discouraged, or disengaged. What's the difference?

Kluger and DeNisi identified a pattern. Feedback that threatens self-esteem—that feels like a judgment of who you are rather than what you did—tends to reduce performance. The recipient's attention shifts from the task to protecting their sense of self. Learning pauses. Openness fades.

Consider the difference:

"You're not strategic enough." This is feedback about identity. It invites the question: Am I a strategic person or not? The natural response is defense.

"Here's what would make this analysis stronger for the executive audience." This is feedback about the task. It invites the question: What should I do differently? The natural response is engagement.

John Hattie and Helen Timperley's influential 2007 framework maps this distinction. They identified four levels of feedback: task, process, self-regulation, and self. The research is clear: task and process feedback are most effective. Self-level feedback—commentary on the person rather than their work—is least effective and most likely to backfire.

The Frequency Trap

Here's where it gets more counterintuitive.

You might assume that even if some feedback is harmful, more feedback would eventually help—that volume compensates for quality. The CIPD's 2022 evidence review found otherwise: in some studies, weekly feedback actually performed worse than feedback that came less often.

Why? Too-frequent feedback can overwhelm. People act on the latest input without time to synthesize patterns. They lose the forest for the trees. Quality and timing matter more than volume.

This challenges the "continuous feedback" narrative that's dominated HR tech for years. The goal isn't maximum feedback. It's effective feedback—well-timed, task-focused, and forward-looking.

What Effective Feedback Looks Like

Recent research from Carlton Fong and Diane Schallert points to another key factor: temporal orientation. Future-focused feedback—what they call "feed-forward"—is more motivating than diagnostic feedback that dwells on what happened.

The distinction:

Feedback: Here's what you did and how it landed.

Feed-forward: Here's what to try next time.

One closes a loop. The other opens a path.

This doesn't mean ignoring what happened—context matters. But every piece of substantive input should ultimately answer the question: What should I do going forward?

Feedback without a forward component risks being heard as judgment. Feedback with next steps becomes coaching.

What This Means for Performance Management

If you're an HR leader, the implications are significant. Most performance management systems are designed around feedback collection—more check-ins, more input, more data. But if the quality of that feedback isn't right, you're not improving performance. You may be harming it.

The research suggests a different approach:

Design for quality, not quantity. Systems should make it easy to give task-focused, forward-oriented feedback—not just any feedback.

Make feed-forward the default. When feedback requires a "next steps" component, the focus naturally shifts from judgment to coaching.

Train for the task level. Managers need to understand the difference between feedback that threatens identity and feedback that improves work.

Don't mistake activity for progress. High feedback volume isn't a success metric. Changed behavior is.

Try This

Next time you give feedback, try an experiment. Focus entirely on the task and what to do next. Skip any assessment of the person. Notice the difference in how it lands—and how the conversation shifts from defensive to curious.