Research on performance appraisals in organizations has emphasized that performance appraisals should be accurate reflections of an employees’ work and developmental in tone. Very little research, however, has examined the importance of agreement between managers and employees in their perceptions of employee behaviors, competencies, and performance. We address this gap by investigating the important role of manager-employee agreement about employees’ proactive competencies – the self-starting and future-oriented behaviors that are essential to an employee’s job in a fast-changing world of work. Drawing on self-verification theory, we argue that agreement between a manager and an employee about the focal employee’s proactive competency has important implications for how employees perceive and experience their work environment. Using multilevel polynomial regression and response-surface analysis, we tested our hypotheses in a sample of managers and employees at a large financial institution. We found that employee perceptions of voice safety—and subsequent stress—was maximized (stress minimized) when managers and employees agreed about employees’ proactive competency and minimized when they disagreed. Notably, this effect was consistent even when a manager and employee both evaluated the employee’s proactive competency poorly, suggesting that an employee’s experience of work depends in part on the extent to which they and their manager are “on the same page” regarding their capabilities. We discuss the implications of these findings for several literatures.
