A boo is louder than a cheer: How feedback on creative tasks affects misreporting in multi-task environments

Employees increasingly operate in multi-task environments, managing both routine responsibilities and non-routine tasks, such as developing creative ideas. While employees’ creative ideas can be very valuable for firms, resource constraints often entail that managers need to provide negative outcome feedback in the form of a rejection of an employee’s proposed creative idea. This may have unintended consequences beyond the creative context in which it occurs. Drawing from reciprocity literature, we develop and test theory suggesting that when employees receive such negative outcome feedback on a creative, non-routine task, this spills over and increases employees’ misreporting on a routine task. However, this negative spillover effect can be mitigated when managers provide explanatory feedback in addition to the outcome feedback. Evidence from a laboratory experiment as well as a supplemental scenario experiment supports our predictions. Consistent with our theorized argument, additional analyses also show that these effects are driven by employees’ kindness evaluations. Our findings contribute to the misreporting literature by documenting the effects of feedback in multi-task environments and offer practical guidance for managers in identifying situations in which explanatory feedback is particularly beneficial.