The impact of private and public feedback on worker performance-evidence from the lab

Abstract

Previous empirical studies have demonstrated the positive incentive effects of private performance feedback as well as public recognition on work performance. In our laboratory experiments, we directly compare these two feedback schemes. Moreover, we compare their incentive effects across two real-effort tasks that differ in regard to how interesting the subjects perceive working on them. We find that both feedback schemes lead to performance increases compared to the tasks' respective control treatments. In particular subjects' ability and a positive interim feedback enhance performance. Competitive preferences significantly affect performance only in the less enjoyable and challenging task.