In this paper, I conduct three experiments to investigate whether and how relative performance information (RPI) influences employee advice‐seeking and how advice‐seeking, in turn, affects employees' trust in their manager. The first experiment shows that, in a setting where the manager can provide useful advice, RPI increases advice‐seeking frequency, which is marginally positively associated with trust in the manager. The second experiment indicates that RPI increases advice‐seeking frequency when the manager's advice is highly useful, with a marginally significant effect when the advice is of low usefulness. Mediation analyses reveal that RPI alleviates employees' concerns about self‐presentation toward their manager, thereby increasing advice‐seeking frequency, but only when the manager's advice is of high usefulness. The third experiment shows that advice usefulness impacts employees' trust in their manager by influencing their perceptions of managerial competence and benevolence. This paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

We conduct two experiments to examine whether and how the framing (bonus vs. penalty) of a target‐based incentive contract affects knowledge sharing and knowledge seeking. In the first experiment, we predict and find that penalty‐framed contracts increase employees' stress due to the fear of potential loss, which in turn reduces their willingness to share knowledge. Additionally, consistent with loss aversion, employees under penalty‐framed contracts are more likely to seek knowledge than those under bonus‐framed contracts. The second experiment corroborates our theoretical arguments by demonstrating the crucial role of stress in reducing knowledge‐sharing behavior. The results show that, when stress is alleviated through an informal control mechanism, penalty‐framed contracts no longer reduce knowledge sharing. The implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed.