Most managers know they should ask for input, yet many don't, or dismiss what they hear. Employees have a parallel problem: someone who speaks up freely may still keep an important concern to themselves, so more chances to talk do not guarantee that managers hear what they need to.
Sherf, Lee & McElroy · 2026 · Academy of Management Annals
Hesitating in the face of conflicting goals is different from retreating.
When people want two things that conflict, such as raising a problem with a senior leader and staying in her good graces, they may neither push ahead nor back off. They hesitate, weigh the risks, and look for a safer route, a response psychologists call inhibition. Most organizational researchers leave inhibition out or lump it in with avoidance; we argue that an employee who goes quiet may be balancing competing goals, not acting out of fear.
Anseel & Sherf · 2025 · Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
Twenty-five years of feedback research, and still no simple rules.
Researchers use the word "feedback" for everything from an annual rating to an ongoing conversation, then draw general rules as if these were one thing. So advice like "make feedback specific" seems to help in some settings and to get in the way of learning a new task in others. We did find one consistent lesson: people tend to resist less when feedback becomes a two-way conversation about the task.
Sherf, Croitoru & McElroy · 2024 · Personnel Psychology
Asking for feedback and monitoring for it are not the same behavior.
People gather feedback at work by asking for it directly and by monitoring others for cues. People who expect the answer to be useful tend to ask more, and that expectation predicts asking more strongly than fear of looking incompetent does; that fear goes with less asking but not less monitoring. Asking, more than monitoring, goes with better job performance.
Sherf, Parke & Isaakyan · 2021 · Academy of Management Journal
Speaking up and staying silent are not opposites.
How often people speak up and how often they stay silent are only loosely related, so the same employee can do plenty of both. People who believe their input will change something tend to speak up more, and people who feel safe tend to stay silent less. Making it safe to talk may not be enough: people also need to see that speaking up changes something. And silence, more than a lack of voice, goes with burnout.
Sherf & Morrison · 2020 · Journal of Applied Psychology
Confidence can make feedback seem unnecessary.
You'd expect confident people to ask for feedback freely, since criticism threatens them less. But confident people who don't stop to consider how others see their work tend to see little value in outside input, and ask for less of it. Taking the other person's perspective removes that blind spot.
