Discussing multisource feedback with raters and performance improvement

This paper hypothesized that ratees who share their multisource feedback with raters and ask for suggestions would improve more than other ratees. The participants were 5,335 ratees in a large, global corporation who received multisource feedback. Nine months after the initial survey, there was a follow-up survey in which raters indicated whether the feedback recipient had shared the feedback and asked for suggestions. One year after the initial survey, there was a second multisource feedback survey. It was found that sharing feedback and asking for suggestions accounted for only a very small (albeit statistically significant) proportion of variance in improvement over time. This paper discusses factors that may affect the impact of sharing feedback and asking for suggestions following multisource feedback.