Digest 23. How and why managers should promote feedback seeking
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We often hear and say that we live in an Information Age. Information is key in business because possessing, gaining and sharing information can help ourselves and others give the best to the organization. And, to acquire information, we should be able to ask and seek for it – including information about ourselves and how others see us.
Several reasons drive people to seek feedback at work. One above all, is the need to reduce the uncertainty about how one is being evaluated and to know whether one is meeting expectations (check Digest 9 for more). Another reason employees tend to seek frequent feedback, is to self-enhance: that is, they want to preserve a positive self-concept. So they need feedback to improve themselves and ensure that higher performance is achieved. As we can see, both motives to seek feedback require that the feedback received is of high quality. Else, how can one trust it, and use it as a basis for adjusting one’s behavior and performance?
Why feedback quality matters for feedback seeking?
To answer the above question, two researchers (Whitaker & Levy, 2012) conducted a study with 202 employed undergraduate students in a large midwestern American university and their matched supervisors. The participants worked in different industries and organizations, holding occupations as diverse as accountant, pharmacist assistant, call center manager, administrative assistant, clinical coordinator in a hospital, bank teller, paralegal, licensed practical nurse, customer service representative, and restaurant manager.
Whitaker and Levy described feedback quality as the specificity and consistency of the feedback received (check Digest 3 on other features of feedback quality, such as constructiveness). Against this background, they observed that the greater the feedback quality, the more frequent the feedback seeking behavior of employees as reported by their supervisors. The mechanism that explains this is the perceived feedback utility. The better the quality of the feedback provided by their managers, the more people tend to regard it as useful, meaning informative and helpful to achieve an effective performance. This of course leads employees to seek for even more feedback afterwards. Conversely, when employees receive poor quality feedback from their manager, they see it as very limited help. As a result, their efforts in feedback seeking will be subsequently much diminished.
The positive cycle started with high-quality feedback does not end here, because feedback seeking generates several positive consequences. Most notably, the authors observed in their study that task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (i.e., extra-role behaviors aimed at supporting colleagues and the organization) increase.
Again, the researchers investigated why this happens. Role clarity is the mechanism activated by feedback seeking, which explains the improvement in task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCBs). The more frequent the feedback sought by employees, the greater clarity they gain in terms of role demands, assigned goals and expected standards. This evidently has a direct impact on the likelihood of successfully reaching their goals and delivering high performance. Furthermore, because an employee feels important and considered by the manager, who is available to provide feedback to them when needed, s/he would feel part of the organization and give back to it in the form of more extra-role supportive behaviors (OCBs).
Finally, it should also be noted that employees with higher social skills are those who benefit the most from seeking feedback. They are able to communicate feedback needs more precisely, read others more accurately, extract more precise performance- and role-related information, and integrate more successfully this new information into existing knowledge structures to develop a better sense of role clarity. This in turn translates into better performance and more OCBs.
Infographic created by REAL PAL - Promoting feedback seeking
Organizational implications
The study presented above offers the following points to action and reflection for any manager concerned with managing collaborators:
Managers need to provide detailed, specific and consistent feedback in order to encourage employees to seek for more. They can do so by increasing their diligence in preparing and running the feedback meeting (see more on this in Digest 15).
Managers’ feedback quality is especially key to increase the perceived feedback utility. In order to increase the perceived utility of a feedback, this should clearly convey the performance standards and link the expected employee level of performance to the broader organizational goals.
Because higher-quality and more useful feedback leads people to seek for more feedback, over time this will mean that managers will be able to pass on more and clearer information about expected performance and goals to their collaborators and improve their staff in-role and extra-role performance.
In addition to providing feedback of high quality, having good relationship with employees also helps promoting feedback seeking behavior in employees (Digest 4 provides more information on leader-member relationship and feedback).
As more employees start and continue to seek feedback, this behavior would turn into a culture in organization and eventually result in higher employee empowerment. In this regard, it is important to create a good feedback environment (Check out Digest 1 for more details).
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Reference: Whitaker, B. G., & Levy, P. (2012). Linking feedback quality and goal orientation to feedback seeking and job performance. Human Performance, 25(2), 159-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/08959285.2012.658927