Evaluating the impact of feedback about tips on waiter performance

Feedback has been a widely used procedure in many Performance Management interventions. Despite the popularity of feedback as an intervention, few systematic analyses of the functions and effects of feedback used alone have been conducted. The present study was designed to investigate the potential for feedback to function as an Establishing Operation with regard to tips. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 evaluated the feasibility and impact of providing feedback about tips-per-customer. Experiments 2 and 3 evaluated the impact of feedback about tips-per-customer on sales and service. During Experiment 3 the feedback mechanism was refined in order to better isolate the effects of feedback alone.