impact of performance appraisal on employee productivity research paper

Performance Appraisal on Employees’ Motivation: A Comprehensive Analysis

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• First Online: 20 September 2020
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• Maryam Alsuwaidi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9281-8560 19 ,
• Muhammad Alshurideh   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7336-381X 19 , 20 ,
• Barween Al Kurdi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0825-4617 21 &
• Said A. Salloum   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6073-3981 22  

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• International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics

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Several analysis studies have been carried out with a view to providing valuable knowledge into the existing research outline of the performance appraisal and employee motivation. The current study systematically reviews and synthesizes the performance appraisal and employee motivation aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of 27 articles from 2015 to 2020. The research will aim to establish the impact of performance appraisal fairness on the employees’ motivation in an organization. To achieve its objective, the study will adopt descriptive research. It will be informed of a survey, and there will be a sample selection to make the process economical. This shows that there will be a use of different techniques of information collection since the data to be collected a primary data. There will be interviewing of the sample size, and their responses will be noted down. The presence of the researcher may influence some people, and this necessitates the use of questionnaires for the respondents to fill on their own. In addition, most of the analyzed studies were conducted in Malaysia, China, Pakistan, and India. Besides, most of the analyzed studies were frequently conducted in job satisfaction and performance context, employee motivation followed by organizational effectiveness context. To that end, the findings of this review study provide an insight into the current trend of how performance appraisal affects employee’s motivation.

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Maryam Alsuwaidi & Muhammad Alshurideh

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Alsuwaidi, M., Alshurideh, M., Al Kurdi, B., Salloum, S.A. (2021). Performance Appraisal on Employees’ Motivation: A Comprehensive Analysis. In: Hassanien, A.E., Slowik, A., Snášel, V., El-Deeb, H., Tolba, F.M. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2020. AISI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58669-0_61

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The Impact of Performance Appraisals on Employee Productivity: The Case of the Lebanese Retail Sector

• Istivani Helal  

Istivani Helal

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Employee motivation is an ongoing fight for organizations. Arousal, direction, and persistence of planned activity with a purpose are all characteristics of motivation. A company's workers are critical to its future development and success. In many ways, they represent a company's image. Employees are the most critical resource a business may utilize to complete its tasks since they are the most valuable, expensive, and inconsistent. The research focused on quantitative methodology for collecting data and for evaluating the impact of performance appraisals on the performance of employees in the workplace. Data from primary and secondary sources will be gathered and merged to provide a complete picture of the relationship between 360-degree performance evaluations and employee motivation. The survey had been distributed using google forms over a sample of 100 respondents in Lebanese Companies, and the data had been treated using SPSS statistical tool and the results had been displayed in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed a direct relationship between management by objectives, 360 degree appraisal, performance appraisal, and organizational performance.

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The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement through future-focused feedback

Jackie Gnepp

1 Humanly Possible, Inc., Oak Park, Illinois, United States of America

Joshua Klayman

2 Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Ian O. Williamson

3 Wellington School of Business and Government, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Sema Barlas

4 Masters of Science in Analytics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

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All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files ( S1 Dataset ).

Managerial feedback discussions often fail to produce the desired performance improvements. Three studies shed light on why performance feedback fails and how it can be made more effective. In Study 1, managers described recent performance feedback experiences in their work settings. In Studies 2 and 3, pairs of managers role-played a performance review meeting. In all studies, recipients of mixed and negative feedback doubted the accuracy of the feedback and the providers’ qualifications to give it. Disagreement regarding past performance was greater following the feedback discussion than before, due to feedback recipients’ increased self-protective and self-enhancing attributions. Managers were motivated to improve to the extent they perceived the feedback conversation to be focused on future actions rather than on past performance. Our findings have implications for the theory and practice of performance management.

Introduction

Once again, Taylor Devani is hoping to be promoted to Regional Manager. Chris Sinopoli, Taylor’s new boss, has arranged a meeting to provide performance feedback, especially regarding ways Taylor must change to succeed in a Regional Manager position. Like Taylor’s previous boss, Chris is delighted with Taylor’s award-winning sales performance. But Taylor was admonished in last year’s performance appraisal about cavalier treatment of customers and intolerant behavior toward employees. Taylor was very resistant to that message then and there have been no noticeable improvements since. What can Chris say to get through to Taylor?

This vignette highlights three points that will be familiar to theorists, researchers, and practitioners of performance feedback. First, the vignette reflects that performance feedback often includes a mix of both positive and negative feedback. Second, it reflects the common experience that the recipients do not always accept the feedback they get, let alone act on it. Third, it raises the question of what a feedback provider should say (and perhaps not say) in order to enable and motivate the feedback recipient to improve.

The present research focuses on feedback conversations in the context of work and career, but it has implications far beyond those contexts. Giving feedback about performance is one of the key elements of mentorship, coaching, supervision, and parenting. It contributes to conflict resolution in intimate relationships [ 1 ] and it is considered one of the most powerful activities in education [ 2 ]. In all these instances, the primary goal is to motivate and direct positive behavior change. Thus, a better understanding of where performance feedback conversations go wrong and how they can be made more effective is an important contribution to the psychology of work and to organizational psychology, but also to a broad range of psychological literatures, including education, consulting, counseling, and interpersonal communications.

Across three studies, we provide the first evidence that performance feedback discussions can have counterproductive effects by increasing the recipient’s self-serving attributions for past performance, thereby decreasing agreement between the providers and recipients of feedback. These unintended effects are associated with lower feedback acceptance and with lower motivation to change. Our studies also provide the first empirical evidence that feedback discussions promote intentions to act on the feedback to the extent they are perceived as focusing on future performance, rather than past performance. These findings suggest a new line of investigation for a topic with a long and venerable history.

Performance feedback in the workplace

Performance feedback can be distinguished from other types of managerial feedback (e.g., “production is up 12% from last quarter”) by its focus on the recipients’ conduct and accomplishments–doing the right things the right way with the right results. It is nearly universal in the modern workplace. Even the recent trend toward doing away with annual performance reviews has come with a directive for managers to have more frequent, if less formal, performance feedback conversations [ 3 ].

Psychologists have known for decades that the effects of performance feedback on performance are highly variable and not always beneficial: A meta-analysis by Kluger and DeNisi found that the modal impact on performance is none [ 4 ]. Such findings fostered a focus on employee reactions to performance appraisals and the idea that employees would be motivated to change behavior only if they accepted the feedback and believed there was a need to improve [ 5 – 7 ]. Unfortunately, unfavorable feedback is not easily accepted. People have been shown to cope with negative feedback by disputing it, lowering their goals, reducing commitment, misremembering or reinterpreting the feedback to be more positive, and engaging in self-esteem repair, none of which are likely to motivate efforts to do a better job next time [ 8 – 16 ].

We are not recommending that feedback providers avoid negative feedback in favor of positive. Glossing over discrepancies between actual performance and desired standards of performance is not a satisfactory solution: Both goal-setting theory and ample evidence support the idea that people need summary feedback comparing progress to goals in order to adjust their efforts and strategies to reach those standards or goals [ 17 , 18 ]. The solution we propose is feedback that focuses less on diagnosing past performance and more on designing future performance.

Diagnosing the past

Managers talk to employees about both the nature and the determinants of their performance, often with the goal of improving that performance. Indeed, feedback theorists have long argued that managers must diagnose the causes of past performance problems in order to generate insight into what skills people need to improve and how they should change [ 19 ]. Understanding root causes is believed to help everyone decide future action.

Yet causality is ambiguous in performance situations. Both feedback providers and feedback recipients make causal attributions for performance that are biased, albeit in different ways. Whereas the correspondence bias leads the feedback provider to over-attribute success and failure alike to qualities of the employee [ 20 – 22 ], this bias is modified by a self-serving bias for the feedback recipient. Specifically, feedback recipients are more inclined to attribute successes to their positive dispositional qualities, and failures to external forces such as bad luck and situational constraints [ 23 – 26 ]. These self-enhancing and self-protective attributions benefit both affect and feelings of self-worth [ 27 , 28 ].

Organizational scholars have theorized since the 1970’s that such attribution differences between leaders and subordinates are a likely source of conflict and miscommunication in performance reviews [ 12 , 29 – 31 ]. Despite this solid basis in social psychological theory, little evidence exists regarding the prevalence and significance of attribution misalignment in the context of everyday workplace feedback. In the workplace, where people tend to trust their colleagues, have generally positive supervisor-supervisee relations they wish to maintain, and where feedback often takes place within a longer history of interaction, there may be more agreement about the causes of past events than seen in experimental settings. In Study 1, we explored whether attribution disagreement is indeed prevalent in the workplace by surveying hundreds of managers working in hundreds of different settings in which they gave or received positive or negative feedback. (In this paper, “disagreement” refers to a difference of opinion and is not meant to imply an argument between parties.) If workplace results mirror experimental findings and the organizational theorizing reviewed above, then our survey should reveal that when managers receive negative feedback, they make more externally focused attributions and they view that feedback as lacking credibility.

Can feedback discussions lead the two parties to a consensual understanding of the recipient’s past performance, so that its quality can be sustained or improved? One would be hard pressed these days to find a feedback theorist who did not advocate two-way communication in delivering feedback. Shouldn’t the two parties expect to converge on the “truth” of the matter through a sharing of perspectives? Gioia and Sims asked managers to make attributions for subordinates’ performance both before and after giving feedback [ 32 ]. Following the feedback conversation, managers gave more credit for success and less blame for failure. However, Gioia and Simms did not assess whether the recipients of feedback were influenced to think differently about their performance and that, after all, is the point of giving feedback.

Should one expect the recipients of workplace feedback to meet the providers halfway, taking less credit for success and/or more responsibility for failure following the feedback discussion? There are reasons to suspect not. The self-serving tendency in attributions is magnified under conditions of self-threat, that is, when information is conveyed that questions, contradicts, or challenges a person’s favorable view of the self [ 33 ]. People mentally argue against threatening feedback, rejecting what they find refutable [ 11 , 34 ]. In Studies 2 and 3, we explored the effects of live feedback discussions on attributions, feedback acceptance, and motivation to improve. We anticipated that feedback recipients would find their self-serving tendencies magnified by hearing feedback that challenged their favorable self-views. We hypothesized that the very act of discussing performance would create or exacerbate differences of opinion about what caused past performance, rather than reduce them. We expected this divergence in attributions to result in recipients rejecting the feedback and questioning the legitimacy of the source, conditions that render feedback ineffective for motivating improvement [ 7 , 14 , 35 ].

Focusing on the future

Given the psychological obstacles to people’s acceptance of negative feedback, how can managers lead their subordinates to want to change their behavior and improve their performance? This question lies at the heart of the challenge posed by feedback discussions intended both to inform people and motivate them, sometimes referred to as “developmental” feedback. Despite its intended focus on learning and improvement [ 36 , 37 ], developmental feedback may nonetheless explicitly include a diagnostic focus on the past [ 38 ], such as “why the subjects thought that they had done so poorly, what aspects of the task they had difficulty with, and what they thought their strong points were” (p. 32). In contrast, we propose that the solution lies in focusing on the future: We suggest that ideas generated by a focus on future possibilities are more effective at motivating change than are ideas generated by diagnosing why things went well or poorly in the past. This hypothesis is based on recent theory and findings regarding prospective thinking and planning.

Much prospection (mentally simulating the future) is pragmatic in that it involves thinking about practical actions one can take and behavioral changes one can make to bring about desirable future outcomes [ 39 ]. In the context of mixed or negative performance feedback, such desirable outcomes might include improved performance, better results, and greater rewards. Research comparing forward to backward thinking suggests that people find it easier to come up with practical solutions to problems in the future than to imagine practical ways problems could have been avoided in the past: People are biased toward seeing past events as inevitable, finding it difficult to imagine how things might have turned out differently [ 40 – 42 ]. When thinking about their past failures, people tend to focus on how things beyond their control could have been better (e.g., they might have had fewer competing responsibilities and more resources). In contrast, when thinking about how their performance could be more successful in the future, people focus on features under their control, generating more goal-directed thoughts [ 43 ]. Thinking through the steps needed to achieve desired goals makes change in the future feel more feasible [ 44 ]. And when success seems feasible, contrasting the past with the future leads people to take more responsibility, initiate actions, engage in effortful striving, and achieve more of their goals, as compared to focusing on past difficulties [ 45 ]. For all these reasons, we hypothesize that more prospective, forward looking feedback conversations will motivate intentions toward positive change.

Overview of studies

We report three studies. The first explored the prevalence and consequences of differing attributional perspectives in the workplace. Managers described actual, recently experienced incidents of work-related feedback and the degree to which they accepted that feedback as legitimate. The second study was designed to examine and question the pervasive view that a two-way feedback discussion leads the parties to a shared explanation of past performance and a shared desire for behavior change. We hypothesized instead that the attributions of feedback providers and recipients diverge as a consequence of reviewing past performance. In that study, businesspeople role-played a performance review meeting based on objective data in a personnel file. The third study is a modified replication of the second, with an added emphasis on the developmental purpose of the feedback. Finally, we used data from Studies 2 and 3 to model the connections among provider-recipient attribution differences, future focus, feedback acceptance, and intentions to change. Our overarching theory posits that in the workplace (and in other domains of life), feedback conversations are most beneficial when they avoid the diagnosis of the past and instead focus directly on implications for future action.

We conducted an international survey of managers who described recent work-based incidents in which they either provided or received feedback, positive or negative. We explored how the judgmental biases documented in attribution research are manifested in everyday feedback conversations and how those biases relate to acceptance of feedback. Given well-established phenomena of attribution (correspondence bias, actor-observer differences, self-serving bias), we expected managers to favor internal attributions for the events that prompted the feedback, except for incidents in which they received negative feedback. We hypothesized that managers who received negative feedback would, furthermore, judge the feedback as less accurate and the feedback providers as less qualified, when compared to managers who received positive feedback or who provided feedback of either valence.

Participants

Respondents to this survey were 419 middle and upper managers enrolled in Executive MBA classes in Chicago, Barcelona, and Singapore. They represented a mix of American, European, and Asian businesspeople. Females comprised 18% of participants. For procedural reasons (see Results), the responses of 37 participants were excluded from analysis, leaving a sample of 382. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Chicago, which waived the requirement for written consent as was its customary policy for studies judged to be of minimal risk, involving only individual, anonymized survey responses.

Managers completed the survey online, using the Cogix ViewsFlash survey platform. When they accessed the survey, they were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Each participant was instructed to think of one recent work-related incident in which they gave another person positive feedback (provider-positive condition), gave another person negative feedback (provider-negative condition), received positive feedback from another person (recipient-positive condition), or received negative feedback from another person (recipient-negative condition). They were asked to describe briefly the incident and the feedback.

The managers were then asked to complete the statement, “The feedback was __% accurate,” and to rate the qualification of the feedback provider on a scale from 0 = unqualified to 10 = completely qualified. Providers were asked, “How qualified were you to give the feedback?” whereas recipients were asked, “The person who gave you the feedback—how qualified was he or she to give the feedback?”

Lastly, the managers were instructed to make causal attributions for the incident. They were told, “Looking back now at the incident, please assign a percentage to each of the following causes, such that they sum to 100%.” Two of the causes corresponded to Weiner’s internal attribution categories (ability and effort) [ 28 ]. The other two causes corresponded to Weiner’s external attribution categories (task and luck). The wording of the response choices varied with condition. For example, in the provider-positive condition, the response choices were __% due to abilities he or she possessed, __% due to the amount of effort he or she put in, __% due to the nature of what he or she had to do, __% due to good luck, whereas for the recipient-negative condition, the attribution choices were __% due to abilities you lacked, __% due to the amount of effort you put in, __% due to the nature of what you had to do, __% due to bad luck. (Full text is provided in S1 Text .)

A review of the incidents and feedback the participants described revealed that 25 managers had violated instructions by writing about incidents that were not work-related (e.g., interactions with family members) and 12 had written about incidents inconsistent with their assigned condition (e.g., describing feedback received when assigned to a feedback provider condition). The data from these 37 managers were excluded from further analysis, leaving samples of 96, 92, 91, and 103 in the provider-positive, provider-negative, recipient-positive, and recipient-negative conditions, respectively. We tested the data using ANOVAs with role (providing vs. receiving feedback) and valence (positive vs. negative feedback) as between-subjects variables.

There were three dependent variables: managers’ ratings of feedback accuracy, of provider qualifications, and of internal vs. external causal attributions (ability + effort vs. task + luck). Analyses of the attribution variable used the arcsine transformation commonly recommended for proportions [ 46 ]. For all three dependent measures, there were significant main effects of role and valence and a significant interaction between them (see Table 1 and Fig 1 ).

Results for each dependent variable are shown by role (provider vs. recipient of feedback) and valence (positive vs. negative feedback). Error bars show standard errors.

All F (1, 378), all p < .001; effect size measures are partial η 2 . Correlations among dependent measures are shown in S1 Table .

Providers of feedback reported that the incidents in question were largely caused by the abilities and efforts of the feedback recipients. They reported that their feedback was accurate and that they were well qualified to give it. These findings held for both positive and negative feedback. Recipients of feedback made similar judgments when the feedback was positive: They took personal credit for incidents that turned out well and accepted the positive feedback as true. However, when the feedback was negative, recipients judged the failures as due principally to causes beyond their control, such as task demands and bad luck. They did not accept the negative feedback received, judging it as less accurate ( t (192) = 7.50, p < .001) and judging the feedback provider less qualified to give it t (192) = 5.25, p < .001). One manager who defended the reasonableness of these findings during a group debrief put it this way: “We are the best there is. If we get negative feedback for something bad that happened, it probably wasn’t our fault!”

Study 1 confirms that attributional disagreement is prevalent in the workplace and associated with the rejection of negative feedback. Across a large sample of real, recent, work-related incidents, providers and recipients of feedback formed very different impressions of both the feedback and the incidents that prompted it. Despite the general tendency of people to attribute the causes of performance to internal factors such as ability and effort, managers who received negative feedback placed most of the blame outside themselves. Our survey further confirmed that, across a wide variety of workplace settings, managers who received negative feedback viewed it as lacking credibility, rating the feedback as less accurate and the source as less qualified to provide feedback.

These results are consistent with attribution theory and the fact that feedback providers and recipients have access to different information: Whereas providers have an external perspective on the recipients’ observable behavior, feedback recipients have unique access to their own thoughts, feelings, and intentions, all of which drove their performance and behavior [ 24 , 47 ]. For the most part, feedback recipients intend to perform well. When their efforts pay off, they perceive they had personal control over the positive outcome; when their efforts fail, they naturally look for causes outside themselves [ 48 , 49 ]. For their part, feedback providers are prone to paying insufficient attention to situational constraints, even when motivated to give honest, accurate, unbiased, and objective feedback [ 20 ].

In this survey study, every incident was unique: Providers and recipients were not reporting on the same incidents. Thus, the survey method permits an additional mechanism of self-protection, namely, biased selection of congenial information [ 50 ]. When faced with a request to recall a recent incident that resulted in receipt of negative feedback, the managers may have tended to retrieve incidents for which they were not to blame and that did not reflect poorly on their abilities. Such biased recall often occurs outside of conscious awareness [ 51 , 52 ]. For the recipients of feedback, internal attributions for the target incident have direct implications for self-esteem. Thus, they may have tended to recall incidents aligned with their wish to maintain a positive self-view, namely, successes due to ability and effort, and failures due to task demands and bad luck. It is possible, of course, that providers engaged in selective recall as well: They may have enhanced their sense of competence and fairness by retrieving incidents in which they were highly qualified and provided accurate feedback. Biased selection of incidents is not possible in the next two studies which provided all participants with identical workplace-performance information.

In Study 2 we investigated how and how much the feedback conversation itself alters the two parties’ judgments of the performance under discussion. This study tests our hypotheses that feedback discussions do not lead to greater agreement about attributions and may well lead to increased disagreement, that attributional misalignment is associated with rejection of feedback, and that future focus is associated with greater feedback effectiveness, as measured by acceptance of feedback and intention to change. The study used a dyadic role-play simulation of a performance review meeting in which a supervisor (newly hired Regional Manager Chris Sinopoli) gives performance feedback to a subordinate (District Manager Taylor Devani, being considered for promotion). The simulation was adapted from a performance feedback exercise that is widely used in management training. Instructors and researchers who use similar role-play exercises report that participants find them realistic and engaging, and respond as they would to the real thing [ 32 , 53 ].

The decision to use a role-play method involves trade-offs, especially when compared to studying in vivo workplace performance reviews. We chose this method in order to gain greater experimental control and a cleaner test of our hypotheses. In our study, all participants were given identical information, in the form of a personnel file, ensuring that both the providers and recipients of feedback based their judgements on the same information. This control would not be possible inside an actual company, where the two parties might easily be influenced by differential access to organizational knowledge and different exposure to the events under discussion. Additionally, participants in our study completed questionnaires that assessed their perceptions of the feedback-recipient’s performance, the discussion of that performance, and the effects of the feedback discussion. Because this study was a simulation, participants were able to respond honestly to these questionnaires. Participants in an actual workplace performance review might need to balance honesty with concerns for appearances or repercussions; for example, feedback recipients might be hesitant to admit having little intention to change in response to feedback. On the other hand, there are a variety of conditions and motivations that exist in the workplace that cannot be easily simulated in a role-play, such as the pre-existing relationship between the feedback provider and recipient, and the potential long-term consequences of any performance review. Further work will be required to determine how findings from this study apply in workplace settings.

This study comprised two groups that received the same scenarios, but differed with regard to the timing and content of the questionnaires. Recall that the primary goal of Study 2 was to explore how the feedback discussion affects participants’ judgments. For this, we analyzed data from the pre-post group. Participants in this group completed questionnaires both before and after the discussion. Their post-discussion questionnaire included questions evaluating the conduct and consequences of the feedback discussion, including ratings of future focus and intention to change. A second group of participants (the post-only group) completed only a questionnaire after the feedback discussion that did not include future-focus or intention-to-change items. This group allowed us to test whether answering the same questions twice (pre and post the feedback discussion) affected the results.

Participants were 380 executives and MBA students enrolled in advanced Human Resources classes in Australia. They represented an international mix of businesspeople: 59% identified their “main cultural identity” as Australian, 20% as a European nationality or ethnicity, 24% Asian, and 12% other; 5% did not indicate any. (Totals sum to more than 100% because participants were able to choose two identities if they wished.) They averaged 35 years of age, ranging from 23 to 66. Females comprised 35% of the sample. Participants worked in pairs. Five pairs were excluded from analysis because one member of the dyad did not complete the required questionnaires, leaving a sample of 117 dyads in the pre-post group and 68 in the post-only group. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Melbourne. Participants’ written consent was obtained.

Each participant received a packet of materials consisting of (a) background on a fictional telecommunications company called the DeltaCom Corporation, (b) a description of both their role and their partner’s role, (c) task instructions for completing the questionnaires and the role-play itself, (d) a copy of the personnel file for the subordinate, and (e) the questionnaire(s). The names of the role-play characters were pre-tested to be gender neutral. (The full text of the materials is provided in S2 – S7 Texts .)

Personnel file . The personnel file documented a mixed record including both exemplary and problematic aspects of the District Manger’s performance. On the positive side was superior, award-winning sales performance and consistently above-average increases in new customers. On the negative side were consistently below-average ratings of customer satisfaction and a falling percentage of customers retained, along with high turnover of direct reports, some of whom complained of the District Manager’s “moody, tyrannical, and obsessive” behavior. Notes from the prior year’s performance discussion indicated that the District Manager did not fully accept the developmental feedback received at that time, instead defending a focus on sales success and the bottom line.

Questionnaires . Participants in the pre-post group completed a pre-discussion questionnaire immediately following their review of the District Manager’s personnel file. They rated the quality of the District Manager’s job performance on sales, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and ability to manage and coach employees, using 7-point scales ranging from 1 = Very Low to 7 = Very High. They then rated the importance of these four aspects of the recipient’s job performance on 7-point scales ranging from 1 = Not Important to 7 = Very Important. Lastly, participants gave their “opinion about the causes of Taylor Devani’s successes by assigning a percentage to each of the following four causes, such that the four causes together sum to 100%.” They did the same for “Taylor Devani’s failures.” Two response categories described internal attributions: “% due to Taylor’s abilities and personality” and “% due to the amount of effort and attention Taylor applied.” The other two described external attributions: “% due to Taylor’s job responsibilities, DeltaCom’s expectations, and the resources provided” and “% due to chance and random luck.” (We chose the expression “random luck” to imply uncontrollable environmental factors in contrast to a trait or feature of a lucky or unlucky person [ 54 ].) Participants chose a percentage from 0 to 100 for each cause, using scales in increments of 5 percentage points. In 4.4% of cases, participants’ four attribution ratings summed to a total, T , that did not equal 100. In those cases, all the ratings were adjusted by multiplying by (100 / T ).

Participants in both the pre-post group and the post-only group completed a post-discussion questionnaire following their feedback discussion. This questionnaire asked the participants to rate the favorability of the feedback given, on an 11-point scale from 0 = “Almost all negative” to 10 = “Almost all positive”; the accuracy of the feedback, on a scale from 0% to 100% in increments of 5%; and how qualified the provider was to give the feedback, on an 11-point scale from 0 = “Unqualified” to 10 = “Completely qualified.” It continued by asking all of the pre-discussion questionnaire items, allowing us to assess any rating changes that occurred in the pre-post group as a consequence of the intervening feedback discussion. Next, for those in the pre-post group, the questionnaire presented a series of 7-point Likert-scale items concerning the conduct and consequences of the feedback. These included items evaluating future focus and intention to change. Additionally, the post-discussion questionnaires of both groups contained exploratory questions about the behaviors of the individual role-players; these were not analyzed. On the final page, participants provided demographic information about themselves.

Participants were randomly assigned to dyads and to roles within each dyad. They were sent to private study rooms to complete the procedure. Instructions indicated (a) 15 minutes to review the personnel file, (b) 5 minutes to complete the pre-discussion questionnaire (pre-post group only), (c) 20 minutes to hold the feedback discussion, and (d) 15 minutes to complete the post-discussion questionnaire. Participants were instructed to stay in role during the entire exercise, including completion of the questionnaires. They were told to complete all steps individually without consulting their partner except, of course, for the feedback discussion. The feedback provider was directed by the task instructions to focus on the recipient’s “weaknesses as a manager–those aspects of performance Taylor must change to achieve future success if promoted.” The reason for this additional instruction was to balance the discussion of successes and failures. Prior pilot testing showed that without this instruction there was a tendency for role-players to avoid discussing shortcomings at all, a finding consistent with research showing that people are reluctant to deliver negative feedback and sometimes distort it to make it more positive [ 35 , 55 – 57 ]. When they finished, the participants handed in all the materials and took part in a group debrief of the performance review simulation.

We used analyses of variance to study differences in how the participants interpreted the past performance of the feedback recipient. The dependent variables were participant judgments of (a) internal vs. external attributions for the feedback recipient’s performance, (b) the quality of various aspects of job performance, and (c) the importance of those aspects. One set of ANOVAs used post-feedback questionnaire data from both the pre-post and post-only groups to check whether completing a pre-discussion questionnaire affected post-discussion results. The independent variables were role (provider or recipient of feedback), outcomes (successes or failures of the feedback recipient), and group (pre-post or post-only). A second set of ANOVAs used data from the pre-discussion and post-discussion questionnaires of the pre-post group to test our hypothesis that feedback discussions tend to drive providers’ and recipients’ interpretations of performance further apart rather than closer together. The independent variables in these analyses were role , outcomes , and timing (before or after feedback conversation). In all the ANOVAs, the dyad was treated as a unit (i.e., as though a single participant) because the responses of the two members of a dyad can hardly be considered independent of one another. Accordingly, role, outcomes, group, and timing were all within-dyad variables.

A third set of analyses provided tests of our hypotheses that provider-recipient disagreement about attributions interferes with feedback effectiveness, and that a focus on future behavior, rather than past behavior, improves feedback effectiveness. We conducted regression analyses using data from the pre-post group, whose questionnaires included the set of Likert-scale items concerning the conduct and consequences of the feedback discussion. The dependent variables for these regressions were two measures of feedback effectiveness derived from recipient responses: the recipients’ acceptance of the feedback as legitimate and the recipients’ expressed intention to change. The predictors represented five characteristics measured from the post-feedback questionnaire: provider-recipient disagreement about attributions, about performance quality, and about performance importance; how favorable the recipient found the feedback to be; and the extent to which the recipient judged the conversation to be future focused.

Role differences in the interpretation of past performance before and after feedback discussion

Given the results of Study 1 and established phenomena in social psychology, we expected feedback recipients to make internal attributions for their successes and external for their failures more than feedback providers do, to hold more favorable views of their job performance quality than providers do, and to see their successes as more important and/or their failures as less important than providers do. Analyses of the post-discussion ratings in the pre-post and post-only groups ( S1 Analyses ) confirm those expectations for attributions and for performance quality, but not for performance importance. There were no differences between the pre-post and post-only groups on any of those measures, with all partial η 2 < .02. Beyond that, we hypothesized that feedback conversations do not reduce provider-recipient differences in interpretation, and may well make them larger. Accordingly, we report here the analyses that include the timing variable, using data from the pre-post group ( Table 2 ).

F (1, 116) for internal attributions, F (1, 114) for performance quality and importance. Underlined values are effects with p < .05 and partial η 2 > .05.

Internal vs . external attributions . Participants in both roles provided attribution ratings before and after the discussion, separately “about the causes of Taylor Devani’s successes” and “about the causes of Taylor Devani’s failures.” There were three significant effects, all of which were interactions. Those were Role x Outcomes, Outcomes x Timing, and Role x Outcomes x Timing. As shown in Fig 2 , the three-way interaction reflects the following pattern: The parties began with only minor (and not statistically significant) differences in attributional perspective. Following the feedback discussion however, those differences were much greater. There were no significant effects involving timing for feedback providers: Their attributions changed only slightly from pre- to post-discussion. Feedback recipients, in contrast, showed a highly significant Outcomes x Timing interaction, F (1, 116) = 19.6, p < .001, η 2 = .14. Following the feedback conversation, recipients attributed their successes more to internal factors than they did before the conversation and they attributed their failures more to external factors than before ( t (116) = 4.5, p < .001 and t (116) = 3.3, p = .001, respectively). At the end, the two parties’ attributions were well apart on both successes and failures ( t (116) = 2.3, p = .024 and t (116) = 3.0, p = .003). In sum, the performance review discussion led to greater disagreement between the feedback providers and recipients due to the recipients of feedback making more self-enhancing and self-protecting performance attributions.

Results are shown by role (provider vs. recipient of feedback), outcomes (successes vs. failures), and timing (before vs. after feedback). Error bars show standard errors.

Performance quality . There were main effects of outcomes and role, but no interactions. As intended, participants rated performance on sales much more highly than they rated the other job aspects (6.72 vs. 3.32 out of 7). Overall, recipients evaluated their performances slightly more positively than the providers did (5.13 vs. 4.91).

Performance importance . There was a main effect of outcome, modified by significant Role x Outcomes and Role x Outcomes x Timing interactions. To understand these effects, we followed up with analyses of role and timing for successes and for failures, separately. Feedback recipients rated their successes as more important than feedback providers did (6.41 and 6.12, respectively; F (1, 115) = 6.20, p = .014, η 2 = .05), with no significant effects of time. In contrast, importance ratings for failures showed a Role x Timing interaction ( F (1, 114) = 7.77, p = .006, η 2 = .06): Providers rated failures as more important before discussion, becoming more lenient following discussion (5.75 vs. 5.42; t (114) = 2.22, p = .028), consistent with the findings of Gioia and Sims [ 32 ]. Recipient ratings showed no significant change as a consequence of discussion.

These analyses suggest that in performance conversations, feedback providers do not lead recipients to see things their way: Recipient interpretations of past performance do not become more like provider interpretations. In fact, following discussion, recipients’ causal attributions are further from those of the providers. Moreover, across dyads, there was no correlation between the recipient’s ratings and the provider’s ratings following discussion: Although a ceiling effect limits the potential for correlations on the quality of sales performance (success), the other measures, especially attributions, show considerable variation in responses across dyads but still no provider-recipient correlations ( S2 and S3 Tables). For performance quality, performance importance, and attributions, for successes and for failures, all | r | < .12 ( p > .22, N = 115 to 117).

Effects of attribution disagreement and future focus on recipients’ acceptance of feedback and intention to change

We hypothesized that provider-recipient disagreement about attributions negatively impacts feedback in two ways, by reducing the extent to which recipients accept the feedback as legitimate, and by reducing the recipient’s intentions to change in response to the feedback. We further hypothesized that a focus on future behavior, rather than past behavior, would engender greater acceptance of feedback and greater intention to change. The present study provides evidence for both of those hypotheses.

We measured feedback acceptance by averaging ratings on feedback accuracy and provider qualifications, both scaled 0 to 100 ( r = .448). We measured intention to change as the average of recipients’ responses to three of the Likert questions in the post-feedback-discussion questionnaire (α = .94):

Based on the feedback, you are now motivated to change your behavior. You see the value of acting on Chris’s suggestions. You will likely change your behavior, based on the feedback received.

We analyzed these two measures of feedback effectiveness using regressions with five variables that might predict the outcome of the discussion: post-feedback disagreement about attributions, performance quality, and performance importance (all scored such that positive numbers indicate that the recipient made judgments more favorable to the recipient than did the provider); how favorable the recipient found the feedback to be (rated from 0 = almost all negative to 10 = almost all positive); and the extent to which the recipient thought the conversation was future focused. This last measure is the average of the recipient’s ratings on the following three Likert questions on the post-feedback questionnaire (α = .75):

You and Chris spent a large part of this session generating new ideas for your next steps. The feedback conversation centered on what will make you most successful going forward. The feedback discussion focused mostly on your future behavior.

We hypothesized that the recipients’ acceptance of feedback and intention to change would be affected by the recipients’ impressions of how future focused the discussion was. That said, we note that the provider’s and the recipient’s ratings of future focus were well correlated across dyads ( r (115) = .423, p < .001), suggesting that recipients’ ratings of future focus reflected characteristics of the discussion that were perceived by both parties.

As shown in Table 3 , recipients’ ratings of future focus proved to be the best predictor of their ratings of both feedback acceptance and intention to change. Recipients’ favorability ratings also significantly predicted their intention to change and, especially, their acceptance of the feedback. Attribution disagreement between providers and recipients predicted lower acceptance of feedback, but not intention to change. Differences of opinion regarding the quality and importance of various aspects of job performance had no significant effects and, as shown by Model 2 in Table 3 , removing them had almost no effect.

Model 1 includes all five predictor variables. Model 2 excludes the two that showed no significant effects in Model 1. Numbers in brackets are adjusted R 2 s.

As in Study 1, we again observe that the providers and recipients of feedback formed very different impressions about past performance. A new and important finding in this study is that feedback conversations did not merely fail to diminish provider-recipient disagreements about what led to strong and weak performance; they actually turned minor disagreements into major ones. Recipients made more self-enhancing and self-protective attributions following the performance discussion, believing more strongly than before that their successes were caused by internal factors (their ability, personality, effort, and attention) and their failures were caused by external factors (job responsibilities, employer expectations, resources provided, and bad luck). There were also modest disagreements regarding the quality and importance of different aspects of the recipient’s job performance, but these did not worsen following discussion. The most important source of disagreement between providers and recipients then, especially following the feedback conversation, was not about what happened, but about why it happened.

What led recipients of performance feedback to accept it as legitimate and helpful? The best predictor of feedback effectiveness was the extent to which the discussion was perceived as future focused. Unsurprisingly, feedback was also easier to accept when it was more favorable. As predicted, recipients were more likely to accept feedback when they and the feedback providers agreed more about what caused the past events. Greater attribution agreement, however, did not increase recipients’ intention to change. These findings suggest that reaching agreement on the causes of past performance is neither likely to happen (because feedback discussions widen causal attribution disagreement) nor is it necessary for fostering change. What does matter is the extent to which the feedback conversation focuses on generating new ideas for future success. We further explore the relations among all these variables following the reporting of Study 3.

Performance feedback serves goals other than improving performance. For example, performance reviews often serve as an opportunity for the feedback provider to justify promotion and compensation decisions. For the recipient, the conversation may provide an opportunity for image management and the chance to influence employment decisions. People may fail to distinguish between evaluation and improvement goals when providing and receiving feedback. In Study 2, the instructions were intended to be explicit in directing participants to the developmental goal of performance improvement, rather than accountability or rewards. Nevertheless, the providers’ wish to justify their evaluations and the recipients’ wish to influence them might have contributed to the differences we observed in attributions and in judgments about the feedback’s legitimacy. To address this concern, we added a page of detailed company guidelines that emphasized the primacy of the performance-improvement goal over the goals of expressing, justifying, or influencing evaluations. There were two versions of these guidelines, which did not differ in their effects.

Participants were 162 executives and MBA students enrolled in advanced Human Resources classes in Australia. An international mix of businesspeople, 74% said they grew up in Australia or New Zealand, 10% in Europe, 22% in Asia, and 7% other. (Totals sum to more than 100% because some participants indicated more than one.) Participants averaged 39 years of age, ranging from 27 to 60. Females comprised 37% of the participants.

Participants read the same scenario and instructions as in Study 2, with an added page of guidelines for giving developmental feedback ( S8 Text ). They then completed the same post-discussion questionnaires used for the pre-post group of Study 2, minus the ratings of performance quality and importance for various aspects of the job, which showed no effects in Study 2. (The full text of the questionnaires is provided in S9 and S10 Texts). Taken together, these modifications kept the procedure to about the same length as in Study 2. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Melbourne. Written consent was obtained.

Role differences in the interpretation of past performance

As in Study 2, we calculated the sum of the percentages of attributions assigned to internal causes (ability and personality + effort and attention), applying an arcsine transformation. As before, we analyzed the internal attributions measure with a mixed-model ANOVA treating each dyad as a unit. There were two within-dyads variables: role (provider or recipient), and outcomes (successes or failures) and one between-dyads variable (guideline version ). There were no effects involving guideline version (all F < 1). The main effects of role ( F (1, 79) = 50.12, p < .001, η 2 = .39) and outcomes ( F (1, 79) = 113.8, p < .001, η 2 = .59) and the interaction between them ( F (1, 79) = 86.34, p < .001, η 2 = .52) are displayed in Fig 3 , along with the parallel post-feedback results from the previous two studies. As in Study 2, the two parties’ post-discussion attributions were well apart on both successes and, especially, failures ( t (80) = 3.3 and 9.4 respectively, both p ≤ .001). Again, the correlations between the provider’s and the recipient’s post-conversation performance attributions across dyads were not significant for either successes ( r (79) = -.04, p > .69) or failures ( r (79) = -.13, p > .23) suggesting that conversation does not lead the dyad to a common understanding of what led to good or poor performance.

Results are shown by role (provider vs. recipient of feedback) and valence/outcomes (positive feedback for successes vs. negative feedback for failures), following feedback conversation. Error bars show standard errors.

We conducted regression analyses of the recipient’s feedback acceptance and intention to change as in Study 2. The regression models included three predictors: future focus, attribution disagreement, and feedback favorability. Results, shown in Table 4 , replicated our Study 2 finding that future focus is the best predictor of both feedback acceptance and intention to change. As before, attribution disagreement predicted lower acceptance, but in this study it also predicted less intention to change. We again found that feedback favorability ratings were associated with greater acceptance, but this time, not with intention to change. Recipients and providers were again significantly correlated in their judgments of how future focused the conversation was ( r (79) = .299, p = .007).

Numbers in brackets are adjusted R 2 s.

Future focus, as perceived by the recipients of feedback, was once again the strongest predictor of their acceptance of the feedback and the strongest predictor of their intention to change. Conversely, attribution disagreement between the provider and recipient of feedback was associated with lower feedback acceptance and weaker intention to change. As in Studies 1 and 2, recipients made more internal attributions for successes than providers did and, especially, more external attributions for failures. The added guidelines in this study emphasizing performance-improvement goals over evaluative ones did not alleviate provider-recipient attribution differences. Indeed, those differences were considerably larger in this study than in the previous one and were more similar to those seen in Study 1 (see Fig 3 ).

Future focus, attributions, favorability, and the effectiveness of feedback

The strongest predictor of feedback effectiveness is the recipient’s perception that the feedback conversation focused on plans for the future rather than analysis of the past. We seek here to elucidate the relationship between future focus and feedback effectiveness by looking at the interrelations among the three predictors of effectiveness we studied: future focus, attribution disagreement, and feedback favorability.

The analyses that follow include data from all participants who were asked for ratings of future focus, namely those in Study 3 and in the pre-post group of Study 2. We included study as a variable in our analyses; no effects involving the study variable were significant. Nonetheless, because the two studies drew from different samples and used slightly different methods, inferential statistics could be impacted by intraclass correlation within each study. Therefore, we also tested for study-specific differences in parameter estimates using hierarchical linear modeling [ 58 , 59 ]. No significant differences between studies emerged, confirming the appropriateness of combining the data. (The HLM results are provided in S2 Analyses .)

The association between future focus and feedback effectiveness could be mediated by the effects of attribution disagreement and/or feedback favorability. Specifically, it could be that perceiving the conversation as more future focused is associated with closer agreement on attributions or with perceiving the feedback as more favorable, and one or both of those latter two effects leads to improved feedback effectiveness. Tests of mediation, following the methods of Kenny and colleagues [ 60 ], suggest otherwise (see Fig 4 ). These analyses partition the total associations of future focus with feedback acceptance and with intention to change into direct effects and indirect effects. Indirect effects via reduced attribution disagreement were 6.2% of the relation of future focus to feedback acceptance and 2.2% to intention to change. Indirect effects via improved perceptions of feedback favorability were 20.8% of the relation of future focus to feedback acceptance and 4.5% to intention to change. Thus, there is little to suggest that closer agreement on attributions or improved perceptions of feedback favorability account for the benefits of future focus on feedback effectiveness.

The two feedback effectiveness measures are feedback acceptance and intention to change. Following Kenny (2018), standardized regression coefficients are shown for the relations between future focus and two hypothesized mediators, attribution disagreement and feedback favorability ( a ), the mediators and the feedback effectiveness measures controlling for future focus ( b ), future focus and the effectiveness measures ( c ), and future focus and the effectiveness measures controlling for the mediator ( c′ ). The total effect ( c ) equals the direct effect ( c′ ) plus the indirect effect ( a · b ). Data are from Studies 2 and 3. a p = .072; * p = .028; ** p < .001.

Interactions

Future focus might have synergistic or moderating effects. In particular, we hypothesized that perceiving the conversation as more future focused may moderate the negative impact of attribution disagreement on feedback effectiveness. Alternatively, future focus may be especially beneficial when agreement about attributions is good, or when attribution differences are neither so big that they cannot be put aside, nor so small that the parties see eye to eye even when they focus on the past. Similarly, future focus may be especially beneficial when feedback is most unfavorable to the recipient, or when it’s most favorable, or when it is neither so negative that the recipients can’t move past it, nor so positive that the recipients accept it even when the conversation focuses on the past.

We conducted regression analyses with feedback acceptance and intention to change as dependent variables and future focus, feedback favorability, attribution disagreement, and their first-order interactions as predictors. Because some plausible interactions are nonlinear, we defined low, intermediate, and high values for each of the three predictor variables, dividing the 198 participants as evenly as possible for each. We then partitioned each predictor into linear and quadratic components with one degree of freedom each. With linear and quadratic components of three predictors plus a binary variable for Study 2 vs. Study 3, there were seven potential linear effects and 18 possible two-way interactions. We used a stepwise procedure to select which interactions to include in our regressions, using an inclusion parameter of p < .15. Results are shown in Table 5 .

Models include all main effects and those first-order interactions that met an entry criterion of p < .15, plus data source (Study 2 vs. Study 3). Statistically significant values are underlined.

Future focus interacted with feedback favorability—marginally for feedback acceptance and significantly for intention to change. As shown in Fig 5 , recipients who gave low or intermediate ratings for future focus accepted the feedback less when it was most negative ( t (128) = 5.21, p < .001) and similarly, reported less inclination to change ( t (128) = 3.23, p = .002). In contrast, the recipients who rated the feedback discussion as most future focused accepted their feedback and indicated high intention to change at all levels of feedback favorability. These patterns suggest that perceiving future focus moderates the deleterious effect of negative feedback on feedback effectiveness.

Results for each measure of feedback effectiveness are shown by three levels of perceived future focus and three levels of perceived feedback favorability. Error bars show standard errors. Data are from Studies 2 and 3.

On the other hand, we find no evidence that future focus moderates the negative effect of attribution disagreement on feedback effectiveness. Future focus did interact marginally with attribution disagreement for intention to change. However, the benefits of perceiving high vs. low future focus may, in fact, be stronger when there is closer agreement about attributions: The increase in intention to change between low and high future focus groups was 2.30 with high disagreement, 2.37 with intermediate disagreement, and 3.24 in dyads with low disagreement, on a scale from 1 to 7.

Regression-tree analyses

Regression-tree analyses can provide additional insights into the non-linear relations among variables [ 61 ], with a better visualization of the best and worst conditions to facilitate feedback acceptance and intention to change. These analyses use the predictors (here, future focus, attribution disagreement, and feedback favorability) to divide participants into subgroups empirically, maximizing the extent to which values on the dependent measure are homogeneous within subgroups and different between them. We generated regression trees for each of our two effectiveness measures, feedback acceptance and intention to change. Fig 6 shows the results, including all subgroups (nodes) with N = 10 or more.

The trees depict the effects of future focus, attribution disagreement, and feedback favorability on our two measures of feedback effectiveness. The width of branches is proportional to the number of participants in that branch. Node 0 is the full sample of 198. Values on the X axis are standardized values for each dependent measure. Data are from Studies 2 and 3.

Both trees show that future focus is the most important variable, dividing into lower and higher branches at Nodes 1 and 2, and further distinguishing highest-future groups at Nodes A8 and B6. These representations also reinforce the conclusion that perceived future focus does not operate mainly via an association with more positive feedback or with better agreement on attributions. However, attribution disagreement does play a role, with more agreement leading to better acceptance of feedback and greater intention to change, as long as future focus is at least moderately high (Nodes A3 vs. A4 and B7 vs. B8). (The lack of effect at Node B6 is likely a ceiling effect.) Unfavorable feedback makes matters worse under adverse conditions: when future focus is low (Nodes B3 vs. B4) or when future focus is moderate but attribution disagreement is large (nodes A5 vs. A6).

General discussion

Our research was motivated by a need to understand why performance feedback conversations do not benefit performance to the extent intended and what might be done to improve that situation. We investigated how providers and recipients of workplace feedback differ in their judgements about the causes of performance and the credibility of feedback, and how feedback discussions impact provider-recipient (dis)agreement and feedback effectiveness. We were particularly interested in how interpretations of past performance, feedback acceptance, and intention to change are affected by the recipient’s perception of temporal focus, that is, the extent to which the feedback discussion focuses on past versus future behavior.

Management theorists typically advocate evaluating performance relative to established goals and standards, diagnosing the causes of substandard performance, and providing feedback so that people can learn from the past [ 19 ]. They also posit that feedback recipients must recognize there is a problem, accept the feedback as accurate, and find the feedback providers fair and credible in order for performance feedback to motivate improvement [ 7 , 14 , 35 ]. Unfortunately, we know that performance feedback often does not motivate improvement [ 4 ]. Our research contributes in several ways to understanding why that is and how feedback conversations might be made more effective.

Decades of attribution theory and research have elucidated the biases thought to produce discrepant explanations for performance between the providers and recipients of feedback. We show that for negative feedback, these discrepancies are prevalent in the workplace. We also show that larger attribution discrepancies are associated with greater rejection of feedback and, in our performance review simulations, with weaker intention to change. These findings support recent research and theory linking performance feedback, work-related decision making, and attribution theory: Instead of changing behavior in response to mixed or negative feedback, people make self-enhancing and self-protecting attributions and judgements they can use to justify not changing [ 8 , 14 , 62 ].

Our research suggests that the common practice of discussing the employees’ past performance, with an emphasis on how and why outcomes occurred and what that implies about the employees’ strengths and weaknesses, can be counterproductive. Although the parties to a feedback discussion may agree reasonably well about which goals and standards were met or unmet, they are unlikely to converge on an understanding of the causes of unmet goals and standards, even with engaged give and take. Instead, the feedback conversation creates or exacerbates disagreement about the causes of performance outcomes, leading feedback recipients to take more credit for their successes and less responsibility for their failures. This suggests that feedback conversations that attempt to diagnose past performance act as another form of self-threat that increases the self-serving bias [ 33 ]. Surely this runs counter to what the feedback provider intended.

At the same time, we find that self-serving attributions need not stand in the way of feedback acceptance and motivation to improve. A key discovery in our research is that the more recipients feel the feedback focuses on next steps and future actions, the more they accept the feedback and the more they intend to act on it. In fact, when feedback is perceived to be highly future focused, feedback recipients respond as well to predominantly negative feedback as to predominantly positive feedback. Future focus does not nullify self-serving attributions and their detrimental effects [see also 63 ], but it does enable productive feedback discussions despite them.

We used two complementary research methods. Study 1 used a more naturalistic and thus more ecologically valid method, collecting retrospective self-reports from hundreds of managers about actual feedback interactions in a wide variety of work situations [see 64 ]. Studies 2 and 3 used a role-play method that allowed us to give all participants identical workplace performance information, a good portion of which was undisputed and quantitative. With that design, response differences between the providers and recipients of feedback are due entirely to role, unconfounded by differences in knowledge and experience.

What role plays cannot establish is the magnitude of effects in organizational settings. Attribution misalignment and resistance to feedback might easily be much stronger in real workplace performance reviews where it would be rare for the parties to arrive with identical, largely unambiguous information. Moreover, managers’ investment in the monetary and career outcomes of performance reviews might lead feedback recipients to feel more threatened than in a role play and thus to disagree even more with unfavorable feedback. On the other hand, the desire to maintain employment and/or to maintain good relationships with supervisors might motivate managers to re-assess their past achievements, to change their private attributions, and to be more accepting of unfavorable feedback. Data from our role-play studies may not speak to the magnitude of resistance to feedback in work settings (although our survey results suggest it’s substantial), but they do show that feedback acceptance is increased when the participants perceive their feedback to be focused on the future.

Implications for future research and theory

There are few research topics more important to the study of organizations than performance management. Feedback conversations are a cornerstone of most individual and team performance management, yet there is still much we do not know about what should be said, how, and why. Based on research into the motivational advantages of prospective thinking, we hypothesized that feedback discussions perceived as future focused are the most effective kind for generating acceptance of feedback and fostering positive behavior change. Our findings support that hypothesis. The present research contributes to the literature on prospection by highlighting the role of interpersonal interactions in facilitating prefactual thinking and any associated advantages for goal pursuit [ 39 , 43 – 45 , 63 , 65 ]. In this section we suggest three lines of future research: (a) field studies and interventions; (b) research into the potential role of self-beliefs; and (c) exploration of the conversational dynamics associated with feedback perceived as past vs. future focused.

Field research and intervention designs

Testing feedback interventions in the workplace and other field settings is an important future step toward corroborating, elaborating, or correcting our findings. It will be necessary to develop effective means to foster a more future-focused style of feedback. Then, randomized controlled trials that contrast future-focused with diagnostic feedback can demonstrate the benefits that may accrue from focusing feedback more on future behavior and less on past behavior. Participant evaluations of the feedback discussions can be supplemented by those of neutral observers. Such evaluations are directly relevant to organizational goals, including employee motivation, positive supervisor-supervisee relations, and effective problem solving. Assessing subsequent behavior change and job performance is both important and complicated for evaluating feedback effectiveness: Seeing intentions through to fruition depends on many factors, including individual differences in self-regulation [ 66 , 67 ] and factors beyond people’s control, such as competing commitments, limited resources, and changing priorities [ 68 – 71 ]. Nevertheless, the ultimate proof of future-focused feedback will lie in performance improvement itself.

Self-beliefs and future focus

If future focus enhances feedback effectiveness, it may do so via self-beliefs. Growth mindset and self-efficacy, for example, are self-beliefs that influence how people think about and act on the future. Discussions that focus on what people can do in the future to improve performance may encourage people to view their own behavior as malleable and to view better results as achievable. If future focus helps people access this growth mindset, it should orient them toward mastering challenges and improving the self for the future: Whereas people exercise defensive self-esteem repair when in a fixed mindset, they prefer self-improvement when accessing a growth mindset [ 72 , 73 ]. Similarly, feedback conversations that focus on ways the feedback recipient can attain goals in the future may enhance people’s confidence in their ability to execute the appropriate strategies and necessary behaviors to succeed. Such self-efficacy expectancies have been shown to influence the goals people select, the effort and resources they devote, their persistence in the face of obstacles, and the motivation to get started [ 74 , 75 ]. Thus, research is needed to assess whether future focus alters people’s self-beliefs (or vice versa; see below) and if these, in turn, impact people’s acceptance of feedback and intention to change.

We found sizeable variation in the extent to which dyads reported focusing on the future. Pre-existing individual differences in self-beliefs may contribute to that variation. Recent research, for example, finds that professors with more growth mindsets have students who perform better and report being more motivated to do their best work [ 76 ]. In the case of a feedback conversation, we suspect that either party can initiate thinking prospectively, but both must participate in it to sustain the benefits.

Conversational dynamics and future focus

Unlike most studies of people’s reactions to mixed or negative feedback, our studies use face-to-face, real-time interaction, that is to say, two people in conversation. Might conversational dynamics associated with future-focused feedback contribute to its being better accepted and more motivating than feedback focused on the past? Do managers who focus more on the future listen to other people’s ideas and perspectives in ways that are perceived as more empathic and nonjudgmental? Do these more prospective discussions elicit greater cooperative problem solving? Research on conversation in the workplace is in its early stages [ 77 ], but some studies support the idea that high quality listening and partner responsiveness might reduce defensiveness, increase self-awareness, or produce greater willingness to consider new perspectives and ideas [ 78 , 79 ].

Practical implications

Our studies provide the first empirical evidence that managers can make feedback more effective by focusing it on the future. Future-focused feedback, as we define it, is characterized by prospective thinking and by collaboration in generating ideas, planning, and problem-solving. We assessed the degree of future focus by asking participants to rate the extent to which the feedback discussion focused on future behavior, the two parties spent time generating new ideas for next steps, and the conversation centered on how to make the recipient successful. This differs greatly from feedback research that distinguishes past vs. future orientation “using minimal rewording of each critique comment” (e.g., you didn’t always demonstrate awareness of… vs. you should aim to demonstrate more awareness of…) [ 80 p. 1866].

Because future-focused feedback is feedback, it also differs from both advice giving and “feedforward” (although it might be advantageous to incorporate these): It differs from Kluger and Nir’s feedforward interview, which queries how the conditions that enabled a person’s positive work experiences might be replicated in the future [ 81 ], and from Goldsmith’s feedforward exercise, which involves requesting and receiving suggestions for the future, without discussion or feedback [ 82 ].

The scenario at the very start of this article asks, “What can Chris say to get through to Taylor?” A future-focused answer might include the following: Chris first clarifies that the purpose of the feedback is to improve Taylor’s future performance, with the goal of furthering Taylor’s career. Chris applauds Taylor’s successes and is forthright and specific about Taylor’s shortcomings, while avoiding discussion of causes and explanations. Chris signals belief that Taylor has the motivation and competence to improve [ 83 ]. Chris then initiates a discussion in which they work together to develop ideas for how Taylor can achieve better outcomes in the future. (For a more detailed illustration of a future-focused conversation, see S11 Text .)

Conclusions

Our research supports the intriguing possibility that the future of feedback could be more effective and less aversive than its past. Performance management need not be tied to unearthing the determinants of past performance and holding people to account for past failures. Rather, performance may be managed most successfully by collaborating with the feedback recipient to generate next steps, to develop opportunities for interesting and worthwhile endeavors, and to enlarge the vision of what the recipient could accomplish. Most organizations and most managers want their workers to perform well. Most workers wish to succeed at their jobs. Everyone benefits when feedback discussions develop new ideas and solutions and when the recipients of feedback are motivated to make changes based on those. A future-focused approach to feedback holds great promise for motivating future performance improvement.

Supporting information

S1 analyses, s2 analyses, acknowledgments.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, we are grateful to Pino Audia, Angelo Denisi, Nick Epley, Ayelet Fishbach, Brian Gibbs, Reid Hastie, Chris Hsee, Remus Ilies, David Nussbaum, Jay Russo, Paul Schoemaker, William Swann, and Kathleen Vohs.

Funding Statement

This research received funding from the Melbourne Business School while the first three authors were either visiting (JG, JK) or permanent (IOW) faculty there. While working on this research, the first two authors (JG, JK) also worked as owners and employees of management consulting firm Humanly Possible. Humanly Possible provided support in the form of salaries and profit-sharing compensation for authors JG and JK, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the “author contributions” section.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2020; 15(6): e0234444.

Decision Letter 0

PONE-D-20-05644

The future of feedback:  Motivating performance improvement

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: 1. I enjoyed reading this manuscript, but it appears to be unnecessary long in parts and readability would benefit of a more concise style. I would recommend condensing some parts, for example in the methods section for study 2 was overly long and lacked clarity in parts. The description of the second questionnaire was a little confusing in terms of the consistency in how items were measured and the hypothesis was not clear.

2. In the ethics statement for Study 1 (line 184), please explain the rationale behind the waiver of consent.

3. Procedure (line 187) please give details of the survey platform used.

4. Results -Please include the number of participants in each group.

5. Please comment on what normality checks were performed to assess the distribution of the data.

6. Line 470, correlations are discussed but I can’t see a table to support these.

7. The discussion did not address the results in relation to previous literature and lacked a theoretical explanation of the findings (See for example ‘Korn CW, Rosenblau G, Rodriguez Buritica JM, Heekeren HR (2016) Performance Feedback Processing Is Positively Biased As Predicted by Attribution Theory. PLoS ONE 11(2)’ for a discussion of attributional style and self-serving bias. I recommend some rewrite of the discussion with more reference to theory.

8. Some acknowledgement of the effect of individual differences in self-regulation would be useful to include as this may influence how feedback is received in terms of attributions. See for example, ‘Donovan, JJ, Lorenzet, SJ, Dwight, SA, Schneider, D. The impact of goal progress and individual differences on self‐regulation in training. J Appl Soc Psychol. 2018; 48: 661– 674’.

9. The suggestions for improvement at the end of the study would be better to be condensed to give a brief suggestion of methods.

Reviewer #2: The paper reports an interesting and comprehensive work about a relevant issue in organizational psychology. Both the theoretical frame and the applied methodology are original and thorough, though the use of role-play raises some doubts about the robustness of the results (some concerns are raised by the authors themselves (lines 752-760) ). This is, in my opinion, the main limitation of studies 2 and 3. I would suggest that the authors insert a wider reasoning about the choice of using this method to collect their data and the pros and cons.

In the "General Discussion" paragraph the authors state that "We investigated the sources of agreement and disagreement between feedback provider and recipient" (lines 712-713). I strongly suggest that this sentence is being modified, since it doesn't describe the aim nor the results in Study 1 correctly.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Federica Biassoni

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Author response to Decision Letter 0

12 May 2020

Please see uploaded document Response to Reviewers. Text copied here.

Response to Reviewers

We wish to thank the reviewers for their very helpful and constructive comments. We especially appreciate the clarity and specificity with which they framed their suggestions. Below we respond to each reviewer recommendation.

Reviewer #1:

1. I enjoyed reading this manuscript, but it appears to be unnecessary long in parts and readability would benefit of a more concise style. I would recommend condensing some parts, for example in the methods section for study 2 was overly long and lacked clarity in parts. The description of the second questionnaire was a little confusing in terms of the consistency in how items were measured and the hypothesis was not clear.

We revised the methods section for Study 2 (former lines 274-279; 285-414, revision lines 276-281; 299-402). The new version is a full page shorter and, in line with the reviewer’s suggestion, we believe this more concise version is now more readable. It includes a revised description of the post-discussion questionnaires (former 346-367; revision 350-361), clarifying the sequence and types of questions provided to each group. It also includes revisions, mainly in the Design section (former 387-414; revision lines 377-402) to clarify how the various measures related to our hypotheses.

Study 1 was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Chicago, which waived the requirement for written consent as was its customary policy for studies judged to be minimal risk, involving only individual, anonymized survey responses. Their decision cited US Code 45 CFR 46.101(b). Citing the code in our manuscript seemed overly legalistic, but we have added the rest of the rationale to the ethics statement (former lines 184-185; revision 184-186).

We now identify the platform as Cogix ViewsFlash (revision line 188).

We have added the requested information for Study 1 (revision lines 214-215). Following up on the suggestion, we also made it easier to locate the corresponding information for Study 2 (revision lines 316-317).

The general consensus is that the analyses we use, i.e. ANOVA and linear regression, are generally quite robust with regard to moderate violations of normality with Ns on the order of ours (e.g., Blanca, Alarcón, Arnau, Bono, & Bendayan, Psichothema, 2017; Schmidt & Finana, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2018; Ali & Sharma, Journal of Econometrics, 1996; Schmider, Ziegler Danay, Beyer, & Bühner, Methodology, 2010). Nevertheless, we used an arcsine transformation on the variables a priori most likely to suffer from systematic deviations, namely the attribution proportions. Most authors recommend checking for major deviations from normality by plotting model-predicted values against residuals and against the normal distribution (using P-P or Q-Q plots). We did that for our analyses (graphs attached), and found no troublesome deviations, with the possible exception of one variable of minor importance to our main results or theory, namely performance quality ratings for successes in Study 2. We note in the paper that that variable may suffer from ceiling effects (former 468-469, revision 456-457). We did not add a discussion of normality to the paper because of the increased length and complexity that would involve and because it’s seldom an issue of concern with data and analyses like ours. However, we could include the graphs we’ve attached here as supplemental material if you tell us you would like us to do so.

Thank you for alerting us to this inadvertent omission. We now include complete correlation tables for all the variables analyzed in each Study in the supplemental materials: S2 Table for Study 1 (revision lines 224-225) and S11 Tables for Studies 2 and 3 separately and combined (revision lines 458-459), with provider-recipient correlations identified by color shading. (S2 was formerly the dataset for Study 1, but now data from all three studies are contained in S17.)

To better address our results in relation to previous attribution literature and theory, we have revised former lines 723-740 in the General Discussion. Now we more clearly discuss our findings in relation to self-serving bias, self-threat, and both historical and more recent formulations of attribution theory, including the helpful reference the reviewer provided (revision lines 708-735). We have also added a brief discussion of how our results relate to previous literature on future thinking (revision lines 760-762). We attempted to minimize redundancy with the Introduction section. The new material includes several new references.

We added mention in the General Discussion of individual differences in self-regulation, citing two references, including the one helpfully provided by Reviewer #1 (revision line 776). Additionally, we reworded former lines 798-799 (revision lines 793-794) to make it clearer that we are acknowledging individual differences there as well.

We condensed former lines 828-846 from 19 lines to 8 lines (revision lines 823-830), referring the interested reader to new Supporting Information S16 Text for the expanded version. We trust this solution meets the recommendation for a brief suggestion of methods, while also satisfying the interests of those seeking more detail.

Reviewer #2:

1. The paper reports an interesting and comprehensive work about a relevant issue in organizational psychology. Both the theoretical frame and the applied methodology are original and thorough, though the use of role-play raises some doubts about the robustness of the results (some concerns are raised by the authors themselves (lines 752-760)). This is, in my opinion, the main limitation of studies 2 and 3. I would suggest that the authors insert a wider reasoning about the choice of using this method to collect their data and the pros and cons.

We now include a wider reasoning about our choice to use a role-play method and the pros and cons. The new version comprises revision lines 282-298. (We also revised the subsequent paragraph for increased clarity, given the insertion of the new paragraph about the role-play method.)

2. In the "General Discussion" paragraph the authors state that "We investigated the sources of agreement and disagreement between feedback provider and recipient" (lines 712-713). I strongly suggest that this sentence is being modified, since it doesn't describe the aim nor the results in Study 1 correctly.

Thank you for your careful reading. We have re-written that sentence to more accurately capture the results of Study 1 as well as the other two studies (revised lines 697-700).

[Figures attached--please see uploaded document Response to Reviewers.]

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Decision Letter 1

27 May 2020

The future of feedback: Survey and role-play investigations into causal attributions, feedback acceptance, motivation to improve, and the potential benefits of future focus for increasing feedback effectiveness in the workplace

PONE-D-20-05644R1

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The bright side of sports: a systematic review on well-being, positive emotions and performance

• David Peris-Delcampo 1 ,
• Antonio Núñez 2 ,
• Paula Ortiz-Marholz 3 ,
• Aurelio Olmedilla 4 ,
• Enrique Cantón 1 ,
• Javier Ponseti 2 &
• Alejandro Garcia-Mas 2  

BMC Psychology volume  12 , Article number:  284 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Metrics details

The objective of this study is to conduct a systematic review regarding the relationship between positive psychological factors, such as psychological well-being and pleasant emotions, and sports performance.

This study, carried out through a systematic review using PRISMA guidelines considering the Web of Science, PsycINFO, PubMed and SPORT Discus databases, seeks to highlight the relationship between other more ‘positive’ factors, such as well-being, positive emotions and sports performance.

The keywords will be decided by a Delphi Method in two rounds with sport psychology experts.

Participants

There are no participants in the present research.

The main exclusion criteria were: Non-sport thema, sample younger or older than 20–65 years old, qualitative or other methodology studies, COVID-related, journals not exclusively about Psychology.

Main outcomes measures

We obtained a first sample of 238 papers, and finally, this sample was reduced to the final sample of 11 papers.

The results obtained are intended to be a representation of the ‘bright side’ of sports practice, and as a complement or mediator of the negative variables that have an impact on athletes’ and coaches’ performance.

Conclusions

Clear recognition that acting on intrinsic motivation continues to be the best and most effective way to motivate oneself to obtain the highest levels of performance, a good perception of competence and a source of personal satisfaction.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

In recent decades, research in the psychology of sport and physical exercise has focused on the analysis of psychological variables that could have a disturbing, unfavourable or detrimental role, including emotions that are considered ‘negative’, such as anxiety/stress, sadness or anger, concentrating on their unfavourable relationship with sports performance [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ], sports injuries [ 5 , 6 , 7 ] or, more generally, damage to the athlete’s health [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. The study of ‘positive’ emotions such as happiness or, more broadly, psychological well-being, has been postponed at this time, although in recent years this has seen an increase that reveals a field of study of great interest to researchers and professionals [ 11 , 12 , 13 ] including physiological, psychological, moral and social beneficial effects of the physical activity in comic book heroes such as Tintin, a team leader, which can serve as a model for promoting healthy lifestyles, or seeking ‘eternal youth’ [ 14 ].

Emotions in relation to their effects on sports practice and performance rarely go in one direction, being either negative or positive—generally positive and negative emotions do not act alone [ 15 ]. Athletes experience different emotions simultaneously, even if they are in opposition and especially if they are of mild or moderate intensity [ 16 ]. The athlete can feel satisfied and happy and at the same time perceive a high level of stress or anxiety before a specific test or competition. Some studies [ 17 ] have shown how sports participation and the perceived value of elite sports positively affect the subjective well-being of the athlete. This also seems to be the case in non-elite sports practice. The review by Mansfield et al. [ 18 ] showed that the published literature suggests that practising sports and dance, in a group or supported by peers, can improve the subjective well-being of the participants, and also identifies negative feelings towards competence and ability, although the quantity and quality of the evidence published is low, requiring better designed studies. All these investigations are also supported by the development of the concept of eudaimonic well-being [ 19 ], which is linked to the development of intrinsic motivation, not only in its aspect of enjoyment but also in its relationship with the perception of competition and overcoming and achieving goals, even if this is accompanied by other unpleasant hedonic emotions or even physical discomfort. Shortly after a person has practised sports, he will remember those feelings of exhaustion and possibly stiffness, linked to feelings of satisfaction and even enjoyment.

Furthermore, the mediating role of parents, coaches and other psychosocial agents can be significant. In this sense, Lemelin et al. [ 20 ], with the aim of investigating the role of autonomy support from parents and coaches in the prediction of well-being and performance of athletes, found that autonomy support from parents and coaches has positive relationships with the well-being of the athlete, but that only coach autonomy support is associated with sports performance. This research suggests that parents and coaches play important but distinct roles in athlete well-being and that coach autonomy support could help athletes achieve high levels of performance.

On the other hand, an analysis of emotions in the sociocultural environment in which they arise and gain meaning is always interesting, both from an individual perspective and from a sports team perspective. Adler et al. [ 21 ] in a study with military teams showed that teams with a strong emotional culture of optimism were better positioned to recover from poor performance, suggesting that organisations that promote an optimistic culture develop more resilient teams. Pekrun et al. [ 22 ] observed with mathematics students that individual success boosts emotional well-being, while placing people in high-performance groups can undermine it, which is of great interest in investigating the effectiveness and adjustment of the individual in sports teams.

There is still little scientific literature in the field of positive emotions and their relationship with sports practice and athlete performance, although their approach has long had its clear supporters [ 23 , 24 ]. It is comforting to observe the significant increase in studies in this field, since some authors (e.g [ 25 , 26 ]). . , point out the need to overcome certain methodological and conceptual problems, paying special attention to the development of specific instruments for the evaluation of well-being in the sports field and evaluation methodologies.

As McCarthy [ 15 ] indicates, positive emotions (hedonically pleasant) can be the catalysts for excellence in sport and deserve a space in our research and in professional intervention to raise the level of athletes’ performance. From a holistic perspective, positive emotions are permanently linked to psychological well-being and research in this field is necessary: firstly because of the leading role they play in human behaviour, cognition and affection, and secondly, because after a few years of international uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic and wars, it seems ‘healthy and intelligent’ to encourage positive emotions for our athletes. An additional reason is that they are known to improve motivational processes, reducing abandonment and negative emotional costs [ 11 ]. In this vein, concepts such as emotional intelligence make sense and can help to identify and properly manage emotions in the sports field and determine their relationship with performance [ 27 ] that facilitates the inclusion of emotional training programmes based on the ‘bright side’ of sports practice [ 28 ].

Based on all of the above, one might wonder how these positive emotions are related to a given event and what role each one of them plays in the athlete’s performance. Do they directly affect performance, or do they affect other psychological variables such as concentration, motivation and self-efficacy? Do they favour the availability and competent performance of the athlete in a competition? How can they be regulated, controlled for their own benefit? How can other psychosocial agents, such as parents or coaches, help to increase the well-being of their athletes?

This work aims to enhance the leading role, not the secondary, of the ‘good and pleasant side’ of sports practice, either with its own entity, or as a complement or mediator of the negative variables that have an impact on the performance of athletes and coaches. Therefore, the objective of this study is to conduct a systematic review regarding the relationship between positive psychological factors, such as psychological well-being and pleasant emotions, and sports performance. For this, the methodological criteria that constitute the systematic review procedure will be followed.

Materials and methods

This study was carried out through a systematic review using PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews) guidelines considering the Web of Science (WoS) and Psycinfo databases. These two databases were selected using the Delphi method [ 29 ]. It does not include a meta-analysis because there is great data dispersion due to the different methodologies used [ 30 ].

The keywords will be decided by the Delphi Method in two rounds with sport psychology experts. The results obtained are intended to be a representation of the ‘bright side’ of sports practice, and as a complement or mediator of the negative variables that have an impact on athletes’ and coaches’ performance.

It was determined that the main construct was to be psychological well-being, and that it was to be paired with optimism, healthy practice, realisation, positive mood, and performance and sport. The search period was limited to papers published between 2000 and 2023, and the final list of papers was obtained on February 13 , 2023. This research was conducted in two languages—English and Spanish—and was limited to psychological journals and specifically those articles where the sample was formed by athletes.

Each word was searched for in each database, followed by searches involving combinations of the same in pairs and then in trios. In relation to the results obtained, it was decided that the best approach was to group the words connected to positive psychology on the one hand, and on the other, those related to self-realisation/performance/health. In this way, it used parentheses to group words (psychological well-being; or optimism; or positive mood) with the Boolean ‘or’ between them (all three refer to positive psychology); and on the other hand, it grouped those related to performance/health/realisation (realisation; or healthy practice or performance), separating both sets of parentheses by the Boolean ‘and’’. To further filter the search, a keyword included in the title and in the inclusion criteria was added, which was ‘sport’ with the Boolean ‘and’’. In this way, the search achieved results that combined at least one of the three positive psychology terms and one of the other three.

Results (first phase)

The mentioned keywords were cross-matched, obtaining the combination with a sufficient number of papers. From the first research phase, the total number of papers obtained was 238. Then screening was carried out by 4 well-differentiated phases that are summarised in Fig.  1 . These phases helped to reduce the original sample to a more accurate one.

Phases of the selection process for the final sample. Four phases were carried out to select the final sample of articles. The first phase allowed the elimination of duplicates. In the second stage, those that, by title or abstract, did not fit the objectives of the article were eliminated. Previously selected exclusion criteria were applied to the remaining sample. Thus, in phase 4, the final sample of 11 selected articles was obtained

Results (second phase)

The first screening examined the title, and the abstract if needed, excluding the papers that were duplicated, contained errors or someone with formal problems, low N or case studies. This screening allowed the initial sample to be reduced to a more accurate one with 109 papers selected.

Results (third phase)

This was followed by the second screening to examine the abstract and full texts, excluding if necessary papers related to non-sports themes, samples that were too old or too young for our interests, papers using qualitative methodologies, articles related to the COVID period, or others published in non-psychological journals. Furthermore, papers related to ‘negative psychological variables’’ were also excluded.

Results (fourth phase)

At the end of this second screening the remaining number of papers was 11. In this final phase we tried to organise the main characteristics and their main conclusions/results in a comprehensible list (Table  1 ). Moreover, in order to enrich our sample of papers, we decided to include some articles from other sources, mainly those presented in the introduction to sustain the conceptual framework of the concept ‘bright side’ of sports.

The usual position of the researcher of psychological variables that affect sports performance is to look for relationships between ‘negative’ variables, first in the form of basic psychological processes, or distorting cognitive behavioural, unpleasant or evaluable as deficiencies or problems, in a psychology for the ‘risk’ society, which emphasises the rehabilitation that stems from overcoming personal and social pathologies [ 31 ], and, lately, regarding the affectation of the athlete’s mental health [ 32 ]. This fact seems to be true in many cases and situations and to openly contradict the proclaimed psychological benefits of practising sports (among others: Cantón [ 33 ], ; Froment and González [ 34 ]; Jürgens [ 35 ]).

However, it is possible to adopt another approach focused on the ‘positive’ variables, also in relation to the athlete’s performance. This has been the main objective of this systematic review of the existing literature and far from being a novel approach, although a minority one, it fits perfectly with the definition of our area of knowledge in the broad field of health, as has been pointed out for some time [ 36 , 37 ].

After carrying out the aforementioned systematic review, a relatively low number of articles were identified by experts that met the established conditions—according to the PRISMA method [ 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]—regarding databases, keywords, and exclusion and inclusion criteria. These precautions were taken to obtain the most accurate results possible, and thus guarantee the quality of the conclusions.

The first clear result that stands out is the great difficulty in finding articles in which sports ‘performance’ is treated as a well-defined study variable adapted to the situation and the athletes studied. In fact, among the results (11 papers), only 3 associate one or several positive psychological variables with performance (which is evaluated in very different ways, combining objective measures with other subjective ones). This result is not surprising, since in several previous studies (e.g. Nuñez et al. [ 41 ]) using a systematic review, this relationship is found to be very weak and nuanced by the role of different mediating factors, such as previous sports experience or the competitive level (e.g. Rascado, et al. [ 42 ]; Reche, Cepero & Rojas [ 43 ]), despite the belief—even among professional and academic circles—that there is a strong relationship between negative variables and poor performance, and vice versa, with respect to the positive variables.

Regarding what has been evidenced in relation to the latter, even with these restrictions in the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the filters applied to the first findings, a true ‘galaxy’ of variables is obtained, which also belong to different categories and levels of psychological complexity.

A preliminary consideration regarding the current paradigm of sport psychology: although it is true that some recent works have already announced the swing of the pendulum on the objects of study of PD, by returning to the study of traits and dispositions, and even to the personality of athletes [ 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 ], our results fully corroborate this trend. Faced with five variables present in the studies selected at the end of the systematic review, a total of three traits/dispositions were found, which were also the most repeated—optimism being present in four articles, mental toughness present in three, and finally, perfectionism—as the representative concepts of this field of psychology, which lately, as has already been indicated, is significantly represented in the field of research in this area [ 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ]. In short, the psychological variables that finally appear in the selected articles are: psychological well-being (PWB) [ 53 ]; self-compassion, which has recently been gaining much relevance with respect to the positive attributional resolution of personal behaviours [ 54 ], satisfaction with life (balance between sports practice, its results, and life and personal fulfilment [ 55 ], the existence of approach-achievement goals [ 56 ], and perceived social support [ 57 ]). This last concept is maintained transversally in several theoretical frameworks, such as Sports Commitment [ 58 ].

The most relevant concept, both quantitatively and qualitatively, supported by the fact that it is found in combination with different variables and situations, is not a basic psychological process, but a high-level cognitive construct: psychological well-being, in its eudaimonic aspect, first defined in the general population by Carol Ryff [ 59 , 60 ] and introduced at the beginning of this century in sport (e.g., Romero, Brustad & García-Mas [ 13 ], ; Romero, García-Mas & Brustad [ 61 ]). It is important to note that this concept understands psychological well-being as multifactorial, including autonomy, control of the environment in which the activity takes place, social relationships, etc.), meaning personal fulfilment through a determined activity and the achievement or progress towards goals and one’s own objectives, without having any direct relationship with simpler concepts, such as vitality or fun. In the selected studies, PWB appears in five of them, and is related to several of the other variables/traits.

The most relevant result regarding this variable is its link with motivational aspects, as a central axis that relates to different concepts, hence its connection to sports performance, as a goal of constant improvement that requires resistance, perseverance, management of errors and great confidence in the possibility that achievements can be attained, that is, associated with ideas of optimism, which is reflected in expectations of effectiveness.

If we detail the relationships more specifically, we can first review this relationship with the ‘way of being’, understood as personality traits or behavioural tendencies, depending on whether more or less emphasis is placed on their possibilities for change and learning. In these cases, well-being derives from satisfaction with progress towards the desired goal, for which resistance (mental toughness) and confidence (optimism) are needed. When, in addition, the search for improvement is constant and aiming for excellence, its relationship with perfectionism is clear, although it is a factor that should be explored further due to its potential negative effect, at least in the long term.

The relationship between well-being and satisfaction with life is almost tautological, in the precise sense that what produces well-being is the perception of a relationship or positive balance between effort (or the perception of control, if we use stricter terminology) and the results thereof (or the effectiveness of such control). This direct link is especially important when assessing achievement in personally relevant activities, which, in the case of the subjects evaluated in the papers, specifically concern athletes of a certain level of performance, which makes it a more valuable objective than would surely be found in the general population. And precisely because of this effect of the value of performance for athletes of a certain level, it also allows us to understand how well-being is linked to self-compassion, since as a psychological concept it is very close to that of self-esteem, but with a lower ‘demand’ or a greater ‘generosity’, when we encounter failures, mistakes or even defeats along the way, which offers us greater protection from the risk of abandonment and therefore reinforces persistence, a key element for any successful sports career [ 62 ].

It also has a very direct relationship with approach-achievement goals, since precisely one of the central aspects characterising this eudaimonic well-being and differentiating it from hedonic well-being is specifically its relationship with self-determined and persistent progress towards goals or achievements with incentive value for the person, as is sports performance evidently [ 63 ].

Finally, it is interesting to see how we can also find a facet or link relating to the aspects that are more closely-related to the need for human affiliation, with feeling part of a group or human collective, where we can recognise others and recognise ourselves in the achievements obtained and the social reinforcement of those themselves, as indicated by their relationship with perceived social support. This construct is very labile, in fact it is common to find results in which the pressure of social support is hardly differentiated, for example, from the parents of athletes and/or their coaches [ 64 ]. However, its relevance within this set of psychological variables and traits is proof of its possible conceptual validity.

Analysing the results obtained, the first conclusion is that in no case is an integrated model based solely on ‘positive’ variables or traits obtained, since some ‘negative’ ones appear (anxiety, stress, irrational thoughts), affecting the former.

The second conclusion is that among the positive elements the variable coping strategies (their use, or the perception of their effectiveness) and the traits of optimism, perfectionism and self-compassion prevail, since mental strength or psychological well-being (which also appear as important, but with a more complex nature) are seen to be participated in by the aforementioned traits.

Finally, it must be taken into account that the generation of positive elements, such as resilience, or the learning of coping strategies, are directly affected by the educational style received, or by the culture in which the athlete is immersed. Thus, the applied potential of these findings is great, but it must be calibrated according to the educational and/or cultural features of the specific setting.

Limitations

The limitations of this study are those evident and common in SR methodology using the PRISMA system, since the selection of keywords (and their logical connections used in the search), the databases, and the inclusion/exclusion criteria bias the work in its entirety and, therefore, constrain the generalisation of the results obtained.

Likewise, the conclusions must—based on the above and the results obtained—be made with the greatest concreteness and simplicity possible. Although we have tried to reduce these limitations as much as possible through the use of experts in the first steps of the method, they remain and must be considered in terms of the use of the results.

Future developments

Undoubtedly, progress is needed in research to more precisely elucidate the role of well-being, as it has been proposed here, from a bidirectional perspective: as a motivational element to push towards improvement and the achievement of goals, and as a product or effect of the self-determined and competent behaviour of the person, in relation to different factors, such as that indicated here of ‘perfectionism’ or the potential interference of material and social rewards, which are linked to sports performance—in our case—and that could act as a risk factor so that our achievements, far from being a source of well-being and satisfaction, become an insatiable demand in the search to obtain more and more frequent rewards.

From a practical point of view, an empirical investigation should be conducted to see if these relationships hold from a statistical point of view, either in the classical (correlational) or in the probabilistic (Bayesian Networks) plane.

The results obtained in this study, exclusively researched from the desk, force the authors to develop subsequent empirical and/or experimental studies in two senses: (1) what interrelationships exist between the so called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ psychological variables and traits in sport, and in what sense are each of them produced; and, (2) from a global, motivational point of view, can currently accepted theoretical frameworks, such as SDT, easily accommodate this duality, which is becoming increasingly evident in applied work?

Finally, these studies should lead to proposals applied to the two fields that have appeared to be relevant: educational and cultural.

Application/transfer of results

A clear application of these results is aimed at guiding the training of sports and physical exercise practitioners, directing it towards strategies for assessing achievements, improvements and failure management, which keep them in line with well-being enhancement, eudaimonic, intrinsic and self-determined, which enhances the quality of their learning and their results and also favours personal health and social relationships.

Data availability

There are no further external data.

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McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets in a slower era

At a glance, macroeconomic challenges continued.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets: A slower era

If 2022 was a tale of two halves, with robust fundraising and deal activity in the first six months followed by a slowdown in the second half, then 2023 might be considered a tale of one whole. Macroeconomic headwinds persisted throughout the year, with rising financing costs, and an uncertain growth outlook taking a toll on private markets. Full-year fundraising continued to decline from 2021’s lofty peak, weighed down by the “denominator effect” that persisted in part due to a less active deal market. Managers largely held onto assets to avoid selling in a lower-multiple environment, fueling an activity-dampening cycle in which distribution-starved limited partners (LPs) reined in new commitments.

About the authors

This article is a summary of a larger report, available as a PDF, that is a collaborative effort by Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alastair Green , Paul Maia, Alexandra Nee , David Quigley , Aditya Sanghvi , Connor Mangan, John Spivey, Rahel Schneider, and Brian Vickery , representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice.

Performance in most private asset classes remained below historical averages for a second consecutive year. Decade-long tailwinds from low and falling interest rates and consistently expanding multiples seem to be things of the past. As private market managers look to boost performance in this new era of investing, a deeper focus on revenue growth and margin expansion will be needed now more than ever.

Perspectives on a slower era in private markets

Global fundraising contracted.

Fundraising fell 22 percent across private market asset classes globally to just over $1 trillion, as of year-end reported data—the lowest total since 2017. Fundraising in North America, a rare bright spot in 2022, declined in line with global totals, while in Europe, fundraising proved most resilient, falling just 3 percent. In Asia, fundraising fell precipitously and now sits 72 percent below the region’s 2018 peak.

Despite difficult fundraising conditions, headwinds did not affect all strategies or managers equally. Private equity (PE) buyout strategies posted their best fundraising year ever, and larger managers and vehicles also fared well, continuing the prior year’s trend toward greater fundraising concentration.

The numerator effect persisted

Despite a marked recovery in the denominator—the 1,000 largest US retirement funds grew 7 percent in the year ending September 2023, after falling 14 percent the prior year, for example 1 “U.S. retirement plans recover half of 2022 losses amid no-show recession,” Pensions and Investments , February 12, 2024. —many LPs remain overexposed to private markets relative to their target allocations. LPs started 2023 overweight: according to analysis from CEM Benchmarking, average allocations across PE, infrastructure, and real estate were at or above target allocations as of the beginning of the year. And the numerator grew throughout the year, as a lack of exits and rebounding valuations drove net asset values (NAVs) higher. While not all LPs strictly follow asset allocation targets, our analysis in partnership with global private markets firm StepStone Group suggests that an overallocation of just one percentage point can reduce planned commitments by as much as 10 to 12 percent per year for five years or more.

Despite these headwinds, recent surveys indicate that LPs remain broadly committed to private markets. In fact, the majority plan to maintain or increase allocations over the medium to long term.

Investors fled to known names and larger funds

Fundraising concentration reached its highest level in over a decade, as investors continued to shift new commitments in favor of the largest fund managers. The 25 most successful fundraisers collected 41 percent of aggregate commitments to closed-end funds (with the top five managers accounting for nearly half that total). Closed-end fundraising totals may understate the extent of concentration in the industry overall, as the largest managers also tend to be more successful in raising non-institutional capital.

While the largest funds grew even larger—the largest vehicles on record were raised in buyout, real estate, infrastructure, and private debt in 2023—smaller and newer funds struggled. Fewer than 1,700 funds of less than $1 billion were closed during the year, half as many as closed in 2022 and the fewest of any year since 2012. New manager formation also fell to the lowest level since 2012, with just 651 new firms launched in 2023.

Whether recent fundraising concentration and a spate of M&A activity signals the beginning of oft-rumored consolidation in the private markets remains uncertain, as a similar pattern developed in each of the last two fundraising downturns before giving way to renewed entrepreneurialism among general partners (GPs) and commitment diversification among LPs. Compared with how things played out in the last two downturns, perhaps this movie really is different, or perhaps we’re watching a trilogy reusing a familiar plotline.

Dry powder inventory spiked (again)

Private markets assets under management totaled $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023, and have grown nearly 20 percent per annum since 2018. Dry powder reserves—the amount of capital committed but not yet deployed—increased to $3.7 trillion, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Dry powder inventory—the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment—increased for the second consecutive year in PE, as new commitments continued to outpace deal activity. Inventory sat at 1.6 years in 2023, up markedly from the 0.9 years recorded at the end of 2021 but still within the historical range. NAV grew as well, largely driven by the reluctance of managers to exit positions and crystallize returns in a depressed multiple environment.

Private equity strategies diverged

Buyout and venture capital, the two largest PE sub-asset classes, charted wildly different courses over the past 18 months. Buyout notched its highest fundraising year ever in 2023, and its performance improved, with funds posting a (still paltry) 5 percent net internal rate of return through September 30. And although buyout deal volumes declined by 19 percent, 2023 was still the third-most-active year on record. In contrast, venture capital (VC) fundraising declined by nearly 60 percent, equaling its lowest total since 2015, and deal volume fell by 36 percent to the lowest level since 2019. VC funds returned –3 percent through September, posting negative returns for seven consecutive quarters. VC was the fastest-growing—as well as the highest-performing—PE strategy by a significant margin from 2010 to 2022, but investors appear to be reevaluating their approach in the current environment.

Private equity entry multiples contracted

PE buyout entry multiples declined by roughly one turn from 11.9 to 11.0 times EBITDA, slightly outpacing the decline in public market multiples (down from 12.1 to 11.3 times EBITDA), through the first nine months of 2023. For nearly a decade leading up to 2022, managers consistently sold assets into a higher-multiple environment than that in which they had bought those assets, providing a substantial performance tailwind for the industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in technology. After experiencing more than eight turns of multiple expansion from 2009 to 2021 (the most of any sector), technology multiples have declined by nearly three turns in the past two years, 50 percent more than in any other sector. Overall, roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals that were entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to market multiple expansion and leverage. Now, with falling multiples and higher financing costs, revenue growth and margin expansion are taking center stage for GPs.

Real estate receded

Demand uncertainty, slowing rent growth, and elevated financing costs drove cap rates higher and made price discovery challenging, all of which weighed on deal volume, fundraising, and investment performance. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent year over year, and funds returned −4 percent in the first nine months of the year, losing money for the first time since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity via redemptions in open-end vehicles, from which net outflows reached their highest level in at least two decades. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, with investors focusing on capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive. Rising interest rates widened bid–ask spreads and impaired deal volume across food groups, including in what were formerly hot sectors: multifamily and industrial.

Private debt pays dividends

Debt again proved to be the most resilient private asset class against a turbulent market backdrop. Fundraising declined just 13 percent, largely driven by lower commitments to direct lending strategies, for which a slower PE deal environment has made capital deployment challenging. The asset class also posted the highest returns among all private asset classes through September 30. Many private debt securities are tied to floating rates, which enhance returns in a rising-rate environment. Thus far, managers appear to have successfully navigated the rising incidence of default and distress exhibited across the broader leveraged-lending market. Although direct lending deal volume declined from 2022, private lenders financed an all-time high 59 percent of leveraged buyout transactions last year and are now expanding into additional strategies to drive the next era of growth.

Infrastructure took a detour

After several years of robust growth and strong performance, infrastructure and natural resources fundraising declined by 53 percent to the lowest total since 2013. Supply-side timing is partially to blame: five of the seven largest infrastructure managers closed a flagship vehicle in 2021 or 2022, and none of those five held a final close last year. As in real estate, investors shied away from core and core-plus investments in a higher-yield environment. Yet there are reasons to believe infrastructure’s growth will bounce back. Limited partners (LPs) surveyed by McKinsey remain bullish on their deployment to the asset class, and at least a dozen vehicles targeting more than $10 billion were actively fundraising as of the end of 2023. Multiple recent acquisitions of large infrastructure GPs by global multi-asset-class managers also indicate marketwide conviction in the asset class’s potential.

Private markets still have work to do on diversity

Private markets firms are slowly improving their representation of females (up two percentage points over the prior year) and ethnic and racial minorities (up one percentage point). On some diversity metrics, including entry-level representation of women, private markets now compare favorably with corporate America. Yet broad-based parity remains elusive and too slow in the making. Ethnic, racial, and gender imbalances are particularly stark across more influential investing roles and senior positions. In fact, McKinsey’s research  reveals that at the current pace, it would take several decades for private markets firms to reach gender parity at senior levels. Increasing representation across all levels will require managers to take fresh approaches to hiring, retention, and promotion.

Artificial intelligence generating excitement

The transformative potential of generative AI was perhaps 2023’s hottest topic (beyond Taylor Swift). Private markets players are excited about the potential for the technology to optimize their approach to thesis generation, deal sourcing, investment due diligence, and portfolio performance, among other areas. While the technology is still nascent and few GPs can boast scaled implementations, pilot programs are already in flight across the industry, particularly within portfolio companies. Adoption seems nearly certain to accelerate throughout 2024.

Private markets in a slower era

If private markets investors entered 2023 hoping for a return to the heady days of 2021, they likely left the year disappointed. Many of the headwinds that emerged in the latter half of 2022 persisted throughout the year, pressuring fundraising, dealmaking, and performance. Inflation moderated somewhat over the course of the year but remained stubbornly elevated by recent historical standards. Interest rates started high and rose higher, increasing the cost of financing. A reinvigorated public equity market recovered most of 2022’s losses but did little to resolve the valuation uncertainty private market investors have faced for the past 18 months.

Within private markets, the denominator effect remained in play, despite the public market recovery, as the numerator continued to expand. An activity-dampening cycle emerged: higher cost of capital and lower multiples limited the ability or willingness of general partners (GPs) to exit positions; fewer exits, coupled with continuing capital calls, pushed LP allocations higher, thereby limiting their ability or willingness to make new commitments. These conditions weighed on managers’ ability to fundraise. Based on data reported as of year-end 2023, private markets fundraising fell 22 percent from the prior year to just over $1 trillion, the largest such drop since 2009 (Exhibit 1).

The impact of the fundraising environment was not felt equally among GPs. Continuing a trend that emerged in 2022, and consistent with prior downturns in fundraising, LPs favored larger vehicles and the scaled GPs that typically manage them. Smaller and newer managers struggled, and the number of sub–$1 billion vehicles and new firm launches each declined to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Despite the decline in fundraising, private markets assets under management (AUM) continued to grow, increasing 12 percent to $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023. 2023 fundraising was still the sixth-highest annual haul on record, pushing dry powder higher, while the slowdown in deal making limited distributions.

Investment performance across private market asset classes fell short of historical averages. Private equity (PE) got back in the black but generated the lowest annual performance in the past 15 years, excluding 2022. Closed-end real estate produced negative returns for the first time since 2009, as capitalization (cap) rates expanded across sectors and rent growth dissipated in formerly hot sectors, including multifamily and industrial. The performance of infrastructure funds was less than half of its long-term average and even further below the double-digit returns generated in 2021 and 2022. Private debt was the standout performer (if there was one), outperforming all other private asset classes and illustrating the asset class’s countercyclical appeal.

Private equity down but not out

Higher financing costs, lower multiples, and an uncertain macroeconomic environment created a challenging backdrop for private equity managers in 2023. Fundraising declined for the second year in a row, falling 15 percent to $649 billion, as LPs grappled with the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions. Managers were on the fundraising trail longer to raise this capital: funds that closed in 2023 were open for a record-high average of 20.1 months, notably longer than 18.7 months in 2022 and 14.1 months in 2018. VC and growth equity strategies led the decline, dropping to their lowest level of cumulative capital raised since 2015. Fundraising in Asia fell for the fourth year of the last five, with the greatest decline in China.

Despite the difficult fundraising context, a subset of strategies and managers prevailed. Buyout managers collectively had their best fundraising year on record, raising more than $400 billion. Fundraising in Europe surged by more than 50 percent, resulting in the region’s biggest haul ever. The largest managers raised an outsized share of the total for a second consecutive year, making 2023 the most concentrated fundraising year of the last decade (Exhibit 2).

Despite the drop in aggregate fundraising, PE assets under management increased 8 percent to $8.2 trillion. Only a small part of this growth was performance driven: PE funds produced a net IRR of just 2.5 percent through September 30, 2023. Buyouts and growth equity generated positive returns, while VC lost money. PE performance, dating back to the beginning of 2022, remains negative, highlighting the difficulty of generating attractive investment returns in a higher interest rate and lower multiple environment. As PE managers devise value creation strategies to improve performance, their focus includes ensuring operating efficiency and profitability of their portfolio companies.

Deal activity volume and count fell sharply, by 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, which continued the slower pace set in the second half of 2022. Sponsors largely opted to hold assets longer rather than lock in underwhelming returns. While higher financing costs and valuation mismatches weighed on overall deal activity, certain types of M&A gained share. Add-on deals, for example, accounted for a record 46 percent of total buyout deal volume last year.

Real estate recedes

For real estate, 2023 was a year of transition, characterized by a litany of new and familiar challenges. Pandemic-driven demand issues continued, while elevated financing costs, expanding cap rates, and valuation uncertainty weighed on commercial real estate deal volumes, fundraising, and investment performance.

Managers faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in many years. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent to $125 billion. While fundraising challenges were widespread, they were not ubiquitous across strategies. Dollars continued to shift to large, multi-asset class platforms, with the top five managers accounting for 37 percent of aggregate closed-end real estate fundraising. In April, the largest real estate fund ever raised closed on a record $30 billion.

Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity through redemptions in open-end vehicles and reduced gross contributions to the lowest level since 2009. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, as investors turned their attention toward capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive.

In the United States, for instance, open-end funds, as represented by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Fund Index—Open-End Equity (NFI-OE), recorded $13 billion in net outflows in 2023, reversing the trend of positive net inflows throughout the 2010s. The negative flows mainly reflected $9 billion in core outflows, with core-plus funds accounting for the remaining outflows, which reversed a 20-year run of net inflows.

As a result, the NAV in US open-end funds fell roughly 16 percent year over year. Meanwhile, global assets under management in closed-end funds reached a new peak of $1.7 trillion as of June 2023, growing 14 percent between June 2022 and June 2023.

Real estate underperformed historical averages in 2023, as previously high-performing multifamily and industrial sectors joined office in producing negative returns caused by slowing demand growth and cap rate expansion. Closed-end funds generated a pooled net IRR of −3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2023, losing money for the first time since the global financial crisis. The lone bright spot among major sectors was hospitality, which—thanks to a rush of postpandemic travel—returned 10.3 percent in 2023. 2 Based on NCREIFs NPI index. Hotels represent 1 percent of total properties in the index. As a whole, the average pooled lifetime net IRRs for closed-end real estate funds from 2011–20 vintages remained around historical levels (9.8 percent).

Global deal volume declined 47 percent in 2023 to reach a ten-year low of $650 billion, driven by widening bid–ask spreads amid valuation uncertainty and higher costs of financing (Exhibit 3). 3 CBRE, Real Capital Analytics Deal flow in the office sector remained depressed, partly as a result of continued uncertainty in the demand for space in a hybrid working world.

During a turbulent year for private markets, private debt was a relative bright spot, topping private markets asset classes in terms of fundraising growth, AUM growth, and performance.

Fundraising for private debt declined just 13 percent year over year, nearly ten percentage points less than the private markets overall. Despite the decline in fundraising, AUM surged 27 percent to $1.7 trillion. And private debt posted the highest investment returns of any private asset class through the first three quarters of 2023.

Private debt’s risk/return characteristics are well suited to the current environment. With interest rates at their highest in more than a decade, current yields in the asset class have grown more attractive on both an absolute and relative basis, particularly if higher rates sustain and put downward pressure on equity returns (Exhibit 4). The built-in security derived from debt’s privileged position in the capital structure, moreover, appeals to investors that are wary of market volatility and valuation uncertainty.

Direct lending continued to be the largest strategy in 2023, with fundraising for the mostly-senior-debt strategy accounting for almost half of the asset class’s total haul (despite declining from the previous year). Separately, mezzanine debt fundraising hit a new high, thanks to the closings of three of the largest funds ever raised in the strategy.

Over the longer term, growth in private debt has largely been driven by institutional investors rotating out of traditional fixed income in favor of private alternatives. Despite this growth in commitments, LPs remain underweight in this asset class relative to their targets. In fact, the allocation gap has only grown wider in recent years, a sharp contrast to other private asset classes, for which LPs’ current allocations exceed their targets on average. According to data from CEM Benchmarking, the private debt allocation gap now stands at 1.4 percent, which means that, in aggregate, investors must commit hundreds of billions in net new capital to the asset class just to reach current targets.

Private debt was not completely immune to the macroeconomic conditions last year, however. Fundraising declined for the second consecutive year and now sits 23 percent below 2021’s peak. Furthermore, though private lenders took share in 2023 from other capital sources, overall deal volumes also declined for the second year in a row. The drop was largely driven by a less active PE deal environment: private debt is predominantly used to finance PE-backed companies, though managers are increasingly diversifying their origination capabilities to include a broad new range of companies and asset types.

Infrastructure and natural resources take a detour

For infrastructure and natural resources fundraising, 2023 was an exceptionally challenging year. Aggregate capital raised declined 53 percent year over year to $82 billion, the lowest annual total since 2013. The size of the drop is particularly surprising in light of infrastructure’s recent momentum. The asset class had set fundraising records in four of the previous five years, and infrastructure is often considered an attractive investment in uncertain markets.

While there is little doubt that the broader fundraising headwinds discussed elsewhere in this report affected infrastructure and natural resources fundraising last year, dynamics specific to the asset class were at play as well. One issue was supply-side timing: nine of the ten largest infrastructure GPs did not close a flagship fund in 2023. Second was the migration of investor dollars away from core and core-plus investments, which have historically accounted for the bulk of infrastructure fundraising, in a higher rate environment.

The asset class had some notable bright spots last year. Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year’s total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes. And as was the case in other asset classes, investors concentrated commitments in larger funds and managers in 2023, including in the largest infrastructure fund ever raised.

The outlook for the asset class, moreover, remains positive. Funds targeting a record amount of capital were in the market at year-end, providing a robust foundation for fundraising in 2024 and 2025. A recent spate of infrastructure GP acquisitions signal multi-asset managers’ long-term conviction in the asset class, despite short-term headwinds. Global megatrends like decarbonization and digitization, as well as revolutions in energy and mobility, have spurred new infrastructure investment opportunities around the world, particularly for value-oriented investors that are willing to take on more risk.

Private markets make measured progress in DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an important part of the fundraising, talent, and investing landscape for private market participants. Encouragingly, incremental progress has been made in recent years, including more diverse talent being brought to entry-level positions, investing roles, and investment committees. The scope of DEI metrics provided to institutional investors during fundraising has also increased in recent years: more than half of PE firms now provide data across investing teams, portfolio company boards, and portfolio company management (versus investment team data only). 4 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023.

In 2023, McKinsey surveyed 66 global private markets firms that collectively employ more than 60,000 people for the second annual State of diversity in global private markets report. 5 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023. The research offers insight into the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in private investing as of year-end 2022. In this chapter, we discuss where the numbers stand and how firms can bring a more diverse set of perspectives to the table.

The statistics indicate signs of modest advancement. Overall representation of women in private markets increased two percentage points to 35 percent, and ethnic and racial minorities increased one percentage point to 30 percent (Exhibit 6). Entry-level positions have nearly reached gender parity, with female representation at 48 percent. The share of women holding C-suite roles globally increased 3 percentage points, while the share of people from ethnic and racial minorities in investment committees increased 9 percentage points. There is growing evidence that external hiring is gradually helping close the diversity gap, especially at senior levels. For example, 33 percent of external hires at the managing director level were ethnic or racial minorities, higher than their existing representation level (19 percent).

Yet, the scope of the challenge remains substantial. Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in senior positions and investing roles. They also experience uneven rates of progress due to lower promotion and higher attrition rates, particularly at smaller firms. Firms are also navigating an increasingly polarized workplace today, with additional scrutiny and a growing number of lawsuits against corporate diversity and inclusion programs, particularly in the US, which threatens to impact the industry’s pace of progress.

Fredrik Dahlqvist is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Stockholm office; Alastair Green  is a senior partner in the Washington, DC, office, where Paul Maia and Alexandra Nee  are partners; David Quigley  is a senior partner in the New York office, where Connor Mangan is an associate partner and Aditya Sanghvi  is a senior partner; Rahel Schneider is an associate partner in the Bay Area office; John Spivey is a partner in the Charlotte office; and Brian Vickery  is a partner in the Boston office.

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Christy, Louis Dufau, Vaibhav Gujral, Graham Healy-Day, Laura Johnson, Ryan Luby, Tripp Norton, Alastair Rami, Henri Torbey, and Alex Wolkomir for their contributions

The authors would also like to thank CEM Benchmarking and the StepStone Group for their partnership in this year's report.

This article was edited by Arshiya Khullar, an editor in the Gurugram office.

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