A new peer-reviewed study out of the University of Exeter, University of Portsmouth, and York University finds that one in four managers withhold performance feedback from the people they supervise, even when that feedback is positive. The research, published in Management Science, ran a controlled experiment with 2,620 participants split into manager and worker roles, where workers completed a cognitive ability quiz and managers decided how much of a worker’s real score to pass along, in full, partially obscured, or not at all.
The finding that should land hardest for talent management teams is not the headline rate. It is who gets shorted. When performance information was negative and imprecise, researchers found managers were nearly twice as likely to withhold it from women than from men, a gap the study’s authors trace to managers trying to protect a worker’s confidence rather than to overt bias. Male workers who did receive negative feedback were more likely to discount it and press on regardless; women who received it were more likely to adjust their choices accordingly, which means selective withholding does not land evenly even when the intent behind it is protective.
The original insight HR teams should take from this: standardizing how feedback gets delivered, structured rating scales, consistent forms, and blind or standardized review templates, does more to close this gap than trying to train individual managers out of a protective instinct they may not even recognize in themselves. That is the same direction people-analytics teams have been pushing performance tooling already, replacing one-off manager judgment calls with continuous, structured listening systems rather than sporadic, manager-discretion feedback moments. This research gives that shift a concrete, quantified reason beyond employee experience: an unstructured feedback process is also a gender-equity liability sitting in plain sight inside routine performance management.
Source: University of Exeter
