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narrative performance reviews allow for more context and can better offer employees ways to improve while affirming their particular strengths. At the same time, some companies who%u2019ve eliminated numerical reviewshave reverted to creating %u201cshadow%u201d rankings, where narrative feedback is offered to employees, but internal numbers are used in order to track growth or to have a more objective way to tie performance to bonuses or raises. This can leave employees feeling like they%u2019re being secretly judged in ways they can%u2019t fight or speak to.So how should companies conduct performance reviews? Do employees actually find narrative structures to be more encouraging and motivating? Are there some circumstances where employees prefer numerical reviews?In new research, published in the Academy of Management Discoveries, we conducted a series of studies to determine which feedback format employees find most fair and motivating. While our findings suggest that narrative feedback is often the most wellperceived, we also found that there are circumstances in which numerical reviews are considered equally fair by employees %u2014 including when they are used determine monetary incentives, like bonuses. We plumb our findings to offer considerations for organizations and managers looking to fairly and accurately motivate, encourage, and improve engagement and performance on their team.How Employees View Performance Review FormatsMuch research has been conducted on how different formats of performance review impact organizational growth. But to our knowledge no studies, until now, have looked at how employees view these feedback formats.To determine how different forms of feedback impact employees%u2019 perceptions of fairness as well as their motivation to improve, we ran four experiments, using online crowdsourcing platforms to recruit about 1,600 U.S. participants with work