Effects of Accurate and Inaccurate Feedback on Work Performance: The Role of the Awareness of Inaccuracy
Save your precision for visible tasks — when employees can’t see their own results, non-contingent feedback works just as well.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lee et al. (2020) ran a lab test with neurotypical adults.
Each adult did a work task on a computer.
Some people saw their results on screen. Others never saw the outcome.
The experimenters gave half of each group accurate feedback. The other half got wrong feedback.
What they found
When workers could see their results, accurate feedback helped them do better.
When workers could not see their results, wrong feedback worked just as well as right feedback.
In other words, accuracy only mattered when the task outcome was visible.
How this fits with other research
Thibodeaux et al. (2025) seems to disagree. They found that more feedback lowered staff performance.
The two studies do not really clash. Thibodeaux looked at frequency, not accuracy, and used a single-case design in a school.
Park et al. (2019) used the same lab set-up. They showed that frequent feedback can be general, saving specific words for rare feedback days.
Together, the three papers tell one story: give feedback often, keep it simple, and save your precision for moments when the learner can see the result.
Why it matters
Stop polishing every note. If your supervisee can see client data, give exact feedback. If the data are hidden, a quick "nice job" is enough. This frees you to spend time where precision pays off.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study compared the effects of accurate (i.e., contingent) and inaccurate (i.e., non-contingent) feedback on work performance under two different work conditions. Under one work condition, participants could clearly see the outcome of their performance (i.e., visible condition). Under the other condition, they could not clearly see the outcome of their performance (i.e., non-visible condition). One hundred and twenty participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions (i.e., accurate/visible, inaccurate/visible, accurate/non-visible, and inaccurate/non-visible) and asked to perform a simulated work task. The results indicated that inaccurate feedback was as effective as accurate feedback under the non-visible condition, but inaccurate feedback was less effective than accurate feedback under the visible condition.
Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 2020 · doi:10.1080/01608061.2020.1746472