Never change a winning routine? How performance feedback affects routine change

Performance feedback has been identified as a “master switch” of routine change, but findings concerning its effects have been limited to the organizational level. To account for performance feedback as a multilevel driver of routine change, we employ a multilevel perspective and distinguish between higher- and lower-level components of routines. Employing a laboratory experiment, we find that, moderated by task complexity, performance feedback does differentially affect change in higher-level and lower-level routine components.