The effect of team feedback and guided reflexivity on team performance change

• Feedback alone does not lead to performance improvements in teams.
• The combination of feedback and prompts to reflect speed up initial performance.
• The proactive analysis of feedback is necessary to feedback effectiveness.
• Effects of feedback and prompts to reflect on performance do not last over time.

Providing teams with feedback has been forwarded as a powerful practice to improve their learning and performance. Yet, this learning potential may not be realized unless teams actively process this feedback by stepping back from their team activity, building plans, and ultimately putting them into action. In an experimental study (N = 212 undergraduate students), we compared the effects of team-level feedback with or without an intervention prompting shared reflection on the feedback (i.e., guided reflexivity) to a no feedback control group on team performance growth. The results showed that only the combination of team performance feedback and guided reflexivity lead to performance change, at the beginning of team activity. These findings suggest that prompting feedback processing at an early stage of collaborative work has the power to help teams benefit from their past experiences and improve performance.