7 Apr 2020
PONE-D-20-05644
The future of feedback: Motivating performance improvement
PLOS ONE
Dear Dr Klayman,
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Comments to the Author
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Reviewer #1: Yes
Reviewer #2: Yes
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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?
Reviewer #1: Yes
Reviewer #2: Yes
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Reviewer #1: Yes
Reviewer #2: Yes
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Reviewer #1: Yes
Reviewer #2: Yes
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5. Review Comments to the Author
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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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