How can managers use positive and negative feedback to encourage employees’ proactive customer service behavior (PCSB)? This question has significant implications because while companies utilize feedback for employee development, it remains unclear how different forms of manager feedback can improve or impair customer service. We synthesize the feedback, goal-setting, and proactive service behavior literature and propose a motivational driver–goal setting–goal striving–goal attainment (MG3) model to help unpack the feedback–PCSB link. Using time-wave survey data in Study 1, we find that feedback-based goal setting fully mediates the effect of positive (but not negative) feedback on PCSB. Using controlled experiments in Studies 2 and 3, we demonstrate that while positive feedback affects feedback-based goal setting through feedback utility, negative feedback does so via feedback accountability, revealing distinct mechanisms. Our research underscores the importance of distinguishing between feedback types when the goal is to foster PCSB.

管理者如何利用正面和负面反馈来鼓励员工主动的客户服务行为（PCSB）？这个问题具有重要意义，因为虽然公司利用反馈来促进员工发展，但仍不清楚不同形式的经理反馈如何改善或损害客户服务。我们综合了反馈、目标设定和主动服务行为文献，并提出了一个激励驱动因素-目标设定-目标奋斗-目标实现（MG3）模型，以帮助解开反馈-PCSB 链接。使用研究 1 中的时间波调查数据，我们发现基于反馈的目标设定完全调节了正（而非负）反馈对 PCSB 的影响。通过研究 2 和研究 3 中的对照实验，我们证明，虽然正反馈通过反馈效用影响基于反馈的目标设定，但负反馈通过反馈责任来影响基于反馈的目标设定，揭示了不同的机制。我们的研究强调了当目标是促进 PCSB 时区分反馈类型的重要性。