Guangyu Yang and Jianan Zhong
With the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) in performance appraisal, employee preferences for AI feedback and manual feedback have gradually become an important topic in management research. Employees’ preference for feedback type in performance appraisal is not only related to the acceptance and trust of the appraisal results, but also may affect their subsequent work performance and career development. The purpose of this study is to investigate how factors such as feedback type and psychological expectations affect employees’ feedback preferences in performance appraisals. This study verified the mechanism of feedback type on feedback preference through one pre-study and three formal studys. The results are as follows:
1. Pre-study & Study1 indicated that in negative feedback situations, employees preferred AI feedback when the expected results were consistent with the actual results, while employees preferred manual feedback when the expected and actual results were inconsistent.
2. Study2 shows that communication ease and embarrassment mediate the relationship between psychological expectations and feedback preference, indicating that psychological expectations further affect employees’ feedback preference by influencing communication ease and embarrassment.
3. Study3 verified the generalizability and reliability of the above effects in a real work situation.
