Transforming Passive Employee Engagement Into Active Engagement: Supervisor Development Feedback Valences on Feedback-Seeking Behavior

Employees’ feedback-seeking behavior is an important way to develop and maintain self-awareness and interpersonal acuity, reduce uncertainty, boost creativity and improve innovative behavior and performance. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home has become the new normal, supervisor feedback and employees feedback-seeking has an increasingly important impact on team creativity and team innovation performance.In the practice of organizational management, there is frequently a “feedback vacuum” between managers and employees. There is increasing research on feedback-seeking behavior in the field of OBHRM. This paper is the first to evaluate the impact of work meaning and positive attributions on workers’ feedback-seeking behavior, and the cross-level effects of supervisor development feedback including variable valence. The paper analyzes supervisor-employee paired data from 158 supervisors and 659 employees using multi-source, multi-temporal data to draw the following conclusions: (1) Positive supervisor development feedback has a significant cross-level positive effect on employee feedback-seeking behavior, whereas negative supervisor development feedback does not affect employee feedback-seeking behavior; (2) Work meaningfulness mediates the cross-level relationship between positive supervisor development feedback and employees’ feedback-seeking behaviors, whereas negative supervisor development feedback and employees’ feedback-seeking behaviors do not; (3) Positive attributions positively moderate the relationship between positive supervisor development feedback and work meaningfulness; while positively moderating the relationship between negative supervisor development feedback and work meaningfulness; (4) Positive attributions have a moderating effect on supervisor development feedback that influences the indirect relationship to feedback-seeking behavior by work meaningfulness.