You’re sitting across from your manager, watching them slide a performance review across the desk. Your eyes skip past the paragraphs and land on a single digit: 3 out of 5. Even if the written feedback praised your project leadership and identified clear growth areas, that middle-of-the-road number feels like a verdict.
Cornell University research suggests this reaction isn’t just personal sensitivity. A study in Academy of Management Discoveries found that employees consistently view narrative-only performance reviews as fairer than those including numerical ratings. Across four experiments with roughly 1,600 participants, removing scores helped people focus on improvement rather than feeling judged.
The research team compared three common formats: numerical ratings alone, written narratives alone, and a combination of both. Professor Emily Zitek and colleagues expected the hybrid approach would balance clarity with nuance. Instead, numbers repeatedly hijacked the conversation.
When a Three Feels Like Failure
Mid-range scores triggered the strongest negative reactions. Participants who received average numerical ratings reported feeling more harshly evaluated than those who received equivalent feedback in words alone. The written explanation became background noise once people saw the score.
This pattern held even when the narrative portion was identical. A paragraph describing solid performance with room for growth landed differently depending on whether it came with a number attached. Without the score, employees treated the feedback as a roadmap. With it, they fixated on the rating itself.
“When we started this project, we thought that combined feedback might be best, but what we ended up finding was that the narrative-only condition was the best in terms of fairness perceptions and preventing people from feeling negatively evaluated,” Emily Zitek explains.
The researchers interviewed HR professionals to understand why organizations cling to numerical systems despite these drawbacks. The answer came down to administrative convenience. Comparing performance across departments, determining bonus pools, and justifying promotion decisions all become substantially harder without standardized scores.
The Exceptions
Narrative feedback lost its advantage in specific situations. When reviews were exceptionally positive, format mattered less. Employees receiving glowing assessments perceived all three approaches as roughly equally fair. Similarly, when feedback was explicitly tied to immediate compensation decisions, people wanted to see the numbers behind their paycheck.
These boundary conditions reveal the fundamental tension in performance management. Numbers serve organizational needs while narratives serve developmental ones. A manager trying to help someone improve faces different constraints than a system trying to allocate limited resources across hundreds of employees.
The study doesn’t argue for eliminating ratings entirely. Rather, it quantifies what many employees have felt but couldn’t articulate: scores carry psychological weight that can undermine the constructive purpose of feedback. For managers focused on growth rather than gatekeeping, that trade-off matters. The choice isn’t just about format but about what a performance review is actually trying to accomplish.
Academy of Management Discoveries: 10.5465/amd.2023.0308
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