Digest 25. Reactions to peer feedback: Women from Venus, men from Mars
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Organizations invest continuously in leadership training and development to secure their leadership pipeline. Often, at the core of their initiatives to strengthen leadership competences is developmental feedback.
Developmental feedback typically follows a quite comprehensive assessment of the current leadership competences, which frequently involves multiple raters (see our Digest 22 on how many raters are needed to increase feedback accuracy). The evaluations expressed by others are compared with one’s self-assessment to derive indications on which areas one should focus on. The underlying assumption is that receiving others’ perspectives will reveal to us our “blind spots” because, in fact, self-ratings are typically inflated.
Does receiving feedback from peers change self-ratings of leadership competences? Are there any differences between women and men?
To answer these questions, Mayo, Kakarika, Pastor, and Brutus (2012) conducted a study with 221 MBA participants at a Business School in Spain. MBA participants were from 27 different nationalities and had on average 6 years of work experience. They were divided into teams of 5 to 6 individuals, and each team worked on all the program’s assignments together. Thus, they had opportunity to know each other well, and self and peer evaluations on leadership competences of one another were collected as part of a personal development workshop. Such evaluations were collected at three different times, at the end of each trimester during the MBA program. One week after each survey, students were given reports on 1) their average score on leadership competences given to them by their peers; and 2) qualitative feedback from their peers in this regard. Then, after receiving guidelines on how to give feedback, students were joined by their team members to discuss their reports.
There are various models of leadership competences, one of which considers four leadership competences resulting from a two by two matrix of two dimensions: 1) whether the competence is directed towards others or the leader her/himself; and 2) whether the competence focuses on understanding or action. The resulting four leadership competences would be: self-confidence; self-management; interpersonal understanding; and behavioral flexibility.
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Mayo and colleagues found that, self-ratings were higher than peer ratings at all three times for all four leadership competences, demonstrating, once more, their inflation. They also found, though, that across time there was a decline in self-ratings to approximate peer evaluations in all four leadership competences.
Moreover, peer feedback had more impact on women in comparison to men. Being more sensitive to social cues, women responded faster to peer feedback and adjusted (lowered) their self-ratings over time and eventually aligned them with peer ratings. While adjustments were also made by men, they were not as quick as women in doing so and they also did not align fully with the peer ratings over time. It is worth mentioning that among the four leadership competences, self-management was the only competence for which there was no gender differences. Since, stereotypically, women are known to be good at self-management and multi-tasking, they seem not to be more sensitive than men to feedback received on this competence.
Organizational implications
Based on the above summarized empirical findings, organizations are encouraged to:
Make sure that peer evaluations are periodically collected to increase self-awareness, reduce inflated self-rating, and diminish the ideal-actual competence gap among leaders. Additionally, peer evaluations may positively impact innovative behaviors (have a look at Digest 19).
Design leadership development programs appropriately, by including peer feedback and coaching, and anticipate gender differences in the response to peer feedback. This may even have implications for the effectiveness of the intervention, because the overlap between self and peer ratings in women may constitute a more reliable basis to identify the gap ideal-actual self and act on it.
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Reference: Mayo, M., Kakarika, M., Pastor, J. C., & Brutus, S. 2012. Aligning or Inflating Your Leadership Self-Image? A Longitudinal Study of Responses to Peer Feedback in MBA Teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(4): 631–652. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0069