Factors affecting employees' intention to provide honest upward ratings
Abstract
Organizations are now changing from merely traditional top-down feedback communication to including a more unusual but effective type of feedback which is delivered upward. Recent research has made several attempts to gain a better understanding of how to improve the quality of the upward ratings because rating inaccuracy is a barrier to utilizing this evaluative information to improve managerial performance. Reasearchers have identified several determinants of employees’ intention to provide honest thoughts on their supervisors’performance. However, as such research is most developed and conducted in Western countries, the results may not hold true in an Asian context. For this reason, this paper attempts to replicate and further explore the research models of factors that influence employees’ intention to honestly rate their superiors in a Vientnamese contexts. An online questionnaire was sent out to potential survey participants and the collected data was analyzed using SPSS and AMOS software. The final conclusion showed that cynicism and fear of retaliation have a negative influence on the intention to share honest upward ratings while knowledge of upward feedback and team psychological safety encourage employees to be honest with their ratings.
Key words: upward feedback, fear of retaliation, upward ratings, cynicism, knowledge of upward feedback, team psychological safety.