A Boo is Louder Than a Cheer: How Rejection and Feedback Type Influence Misreporting

Abstract

Our study investigates how idea rejection (rejection vs acceptance) and feedback type (outcome feedback vs explanatory feedback) affect employees’ misreporting of private information. Drawing on research in social psychology, we predict that employees will perceive rejections to be an unkind act by managers. Consequently, we expect employees to behave reciprocal and punish the managers by misreporting their private information to a greater extent. Moreover, we predict that the link between rejection (acceptance) and employees’ perceived kindness is dependent on the feedback type managers use. Specifically, when employees’ ideas are rejected, providing explanatory feedback will increase their kindness perceptions, thus, reducing employees’ misreporting. When employees’ ideas are accepted, however, providing explanatory feedback will not affect their misreporting because employees will perceive the acceptance already to be relatively kind. Our findings from a laboratory experiment support our predictions as well as the underlying theoretical processes. The results of our study contribute for one thing to theory by identifying rejection as an important factor that influences employees’ misreporting and for another to practice by supporting managers in designing their feedback processes efficiently.