FEEDBACK INQUIRY - THE EFFECT OF SOURCE ATTRIBUTES AND INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES

Sixty-four undergraduate students were presented with 32 scenarious and asked to indicate the likelihood that they would ask for feedback in each situation. Source expertise, accessibility, relationship quality, and reward power varied across the scenarios, and all four had significant effects. Except in the case of accessibility, there were systematic differences in effect sizes across participants. For expertise and relationship quality, these differences were related to need for achievement. For reward power, differences were related to performance expectations. The results demonstrate that there are distinct source attributes underlying feedback seekers' preferences for certain sources over others and that the impact of these attributes varies as a function of performance and individual differences. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.