Why letting workers evaluate their managers actually works

Most startups treat management like a fixed asset. You hire the best you can, set goals, measure outputs, and assume leadership will flow top-down. But what if the most powerful lever to improve team performance wasn’t the manager’s skill or experience—but their willingness to listen?

That’s what a Chinese carmaker discovered in a quiet experiment with enormous results. The study, conducted by Wharton’s Shing-Yi Wang and Maryland’s Jing Cai, involved flipping the traditional script of performance review. Instead of managers evaluating workers, the workers evaluated their managers. Consistently. Anonymously. And for a time, with financial consequences.

The results were undeniable. Turnover dropped by half. Teams became more productive. Managers became more empathetic. And even when the financial link was removed, the behavioral change stuck. This wasn’t just a clever HR tactic. It was a system-level shift—a reprogramming of the organizational culture through one small, repeatable mechanism.

The logic is deceptively simple. If your culture claims to value people, but your systems only measure performance, then what you value isn’t people—it’s output. If workers never get a say in how they’re managed, then management behavior becomes invisible until damage is done. When that loop is broken—when team members are given structured, regular input into how their leaders lead—the culture evolves. Not by force, but by norm.

This isn’t theory. It’s design.

What the researchers did wasn’t flashy. Over the course of eight months, they allowed production-line workers at a major Chinese manufacturer to rate their supervisors on specific traits: fairness, empathy, adaptability, openness to feedback. For the first six months, those ratings affected managers’ bonuses, pay raises, and promotion eligibility. Then for two more months, the financial link was removed—but the feedback continued.

What happened next said more about culture than any values statement ever could.

Managers in the feedback condition changed how they behaved. They encouraged their teams more. They criticized less. They listened. The workers responded in kind—reporting higher morale, more satisfaction, and better team relationships. But here’s the part that matters most for founders and early-stage operators: the effects were sticky. When new workers joined the company after the experiment ended, they still noticed a difference in how managers behaved if those managers had previously been part of the feedback loop.

This wasn’t a one-off intervention. It was an operating system update.

There’s a pattern here that every founder needs to understand. In early teams, culture is fluid. Behavior spreads fast. A single act of trust or betrayal can ripple for months. But as the team grows, power becomes less visible. Managers are hired for their functional skills—production targets, operational experience, speed of execution—but rarely evaluated on their leadership behavior unless it becomes a crisis. Most companies still rely on top-down reviews or occasional 360s that are too late, too vague, or too political to make a difference.

What this study shows is that you don’t need to overhaul your entire culture to get better management. You just need to make feedback visible, routine, and tied to real incentives. At least for a while. Once the loop exists, behavior follows. And over time, new norms take hold.

Let’s pause here and examine why this worked so well.

First, the feedback wasn’t symbolic. For six months, it affected real outcomes. Managers couldn’t ignore it. That accountability made them take it seriously.

Second, it was structured. Workers weren’t writing essays or venting in free-form comment boxes. They were rating specific traits. That made the data actionable and the process defensible.

Third, it was consistent. Every month, the loop repeated. It wasn’t a one-time shock to the system. It became part of the rhythm of the workplace.

And perhaps most importantly, it didn’t require more managers. It didn’t require culture coaches or external consultants. It didn’t even require a raise in base pay. It just required willingness to look at behavior as something worth measuring—not as an HR nice-to-have, but as a core driver of team performance.

This reframes a common startup fallacy. We often believe that culture is created by charisma, vision, or values. But culture, in practice, is created by repetition. What gets reinforced becomes real. If a team regularly sees its managers get rewarded for empathy, listening, and fairness, those behaviors spread. If they see managers protected no matter how they behave—as long as targets are met—then fear and distrust spread instead.

In manufacturing, where turnover is notoriously high, this distinction is even more critical. The study found that workers in the feedback group were 6.2 percentage points less likely to quit. That may sound modest—but in a sector with baseline turnover of over 20%, it amounts to a 50% drop. That kind of retention change has compounding benefits. Less churn means less training. Less training means faster ramp time. Faster ramp time means more throughput. Even if individual productivity doesn’t spike, the team performs better. And over time, that translates into lower costs, higher quality, and better institutional memory.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as an industry-specific case. Manufacturing is hierarchical, procedural, and volume-driven. Of course worker-manager dynamics matter. But the logic holds in any operationally intense environment—retail, hospitality, logistics, even fast-scaling startups where junior staff onboard quickly and middle managers carry the execution burden.

The common factor isn’t industry. It’s power structure.

In any workplace where workers depend on their managers for direction, clarity, and support—and where that support isn’t always visible to higher-ups—the risk of invisible mismanagement is high. When that mismanagement goes unmeasured, it festers. When it’s surfaced through structured feedback, it becomes addressable.

Founders often ask how to scale culture. But what they’re really asking is: how do I preserve the good behaviors while growing beyond personal oversight? How do I make sure our managers lead the way we believe leadership should look—without micromanaging them or adding complexity?

The answer may be simpler than expected. Build a loop where managers get regular, structured, upward feedback. Use that feedback to inform—not dictate—their incentives. Let the loop run long enough to create habit, and then remove the reward if you want. The behavior often persists.

What’s powerful about this approach is how quietly it redefines accountability. Traditional performance management systems are based on targets and metrics—how many units shipped, how many tickets closed, how fast a project moved. But these systems assume that people management is invisible, or at best, secondary.

That’s no longer acceptable. In teams where creativity, retention, and team velocity matter, the behavior of the manager is not a side issue—it’s the engine. If a manager undermines trust, ignores feedback, or creates fear, no amount of target hitting will undo the damage to culture. And culture, as we’ve seen again and again, is what determines whether a startup can scale or not.

There’s also a broader implication here for how early-stage companies build their management layer. Too often, first-time managers are promoted based on technical skill or founder trust. They get little training, vague expectations, and feedback only when things go wrong. The result is not incompetence—it’s confusion. Good people fall back on command-and-control habits. They equate authority with power. They struggle to ask for help because they don’t know what good leadership looks like.

Structured bottom-up feedback helps fill that gap. It gives early managers a mirror—not of their results, but of their relationships. It offers a quiet correction mechanism. And it forces a simple but critical reflection: how do my people actually experience me?

For founders trying to build durable teams, that question may be the most important one of all.

There’s a final insight in the study that’s worth underlining. Even after the link between feedback and financial incentives was removed, the behavior persisted. Managers continued to act with empathy and fairness. Why? Because once a new norm is established—especially when it brings visible team benefits—it becomes its own reinforcement loop. The team responds positively. The manager sees better outcomes. The system sustains itself.

This is a hopeful message. It means that better management isn’t always about more oversight, higher salaries, or expensive programs. Sometimes, it’s about a quiet system tweak. A process that changes behavior through structure, not slogans.

Founders don’t need to wait until they’re 200 people deep to install this. Even at 20 or 30, the early habits around feedback, accountability, and managerial behavior matter. And once a team has seen the power of being heard, it’s hard to go back.

Culture is not what you say in all-hands. It’s not what’s printed in onboarding slides. Culture is what your people do when no one’s watching. And the only way to shape that is by designing systems that make the invisible visible—consistently.

Worker feedback loops aren’t radical. They’re not even new. But in a world where performance still gets measured mostly in numbers, this study reminds us of a deeper truth.

Leadership is experienced, not announced. If you want better managers, ask the people they manage. Then build a system that listens. And keeps listening. Until listening becomes the culture itself.