Digest 5. Why feedback is so challenging with some employees?
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Research has largely confirmed the notion that a supportive feedback environment brings beneficial outcomes. However, employees can vary on their willingness and ability to receive, process, and use feedback. As most people who experienced giving feedback know, the same kind of feedback may have an energizing and positive effect on one employee, and a very dissatisfactory reaction on another.
Feedback orientation as a decisive ingredient
This difference in individual receptivity to feedback has been denominated Feedback Orientation and has not always been taken into account in scientific research. Therefore, a legit question would be whether such differences in feedback orientation can explain why some studies have found feedback to have a negative impact on employees.
Feedback Orientation has been defined via 4 main dimensions by Linderbaum and Levy (2010):
Infographic created by REAL PAL - Feedback orientation
By looking at these dimensions, it gets clearer that an employee low on feedback orientation may have a hard time dealing with feedback, as s/he may not see its value, will not seek it proactively, nor would try to act on it.
To understand whether feedback orientation could indeed attenuate or enhance the impact of feedback environment on employee’s empowerment, Gabriel, Frantz, Levy, and Hilliard (2014) surveyed 212 employees from a US correctional facility organization.
The results showed that:
the supervisor feedback environment increased empowerment three months later only when employees scored high on feedback orientation.
In fact, only these employees reported greater motivation in terms of personal meaning inspired by the job, perceived competence on the job, and self-determination (the perceived level of choice in the different tasks and actions in the workplace).
On the other hand, when employees have low feedback orientation, the effect of supervisor feedback environment on perceived meaning was weaker and actually negative on competence and self-determination.
Practically speaking, these results demonstrate that the feedback environment fostered by supervisors cannot be “one size fits all employees”. Thus, if supervisors were to falsely assume that all employees desire the same feedback environment, this may backfire for those who have low feedback orientation.
The manager’s role
Another interesting finding comes from a recent study by Steelman and Wolfeld (2018). Their results revealed that managers who value feedback for themselves (high feedback orientation) were viewed as better coaches by their subordinates. Thus, if a manager treasures feedback and understands its importance for personal development and behavioral change, she/he should be more inclined to provide high-quality feedback to subordinates, in a thoughtful, empathic manner, and encourage subsequent feedback seeking.
What the study also found was that the manager’s feedback orientation was related to the subordinate feedback orientation. Although the cross-sectional nature of this research does not allow us to draw causal conclusions, it is possible that managers that have a high feedback orientation influence their direct reports’ feedback orientation through promotion of greater acceptance of coaching and appreciation of feedback.
Organizational implications
Although tailoring a feedback system to each employee may be impractical, estimating the feedback orientation of each employee would improve the interpersonal interaction. Furthermore, estimating the feedback orientation of most employees may be helpful to generally identify the feedback environment that would best fit the organization. Specifically, if the majority has a high feedback orientation, a strong feedback environment would be highly valuable. However, if employees have a low feedback orientation, a minimal feedback environment may be more advantageous. – click here for the feedback orientation questionnaire
One way to fostering greater feedback orientation in an organization is to start with training leaders to value feedback so that they will be more open and receptive themselves. In fact, this will improve their coaching relationship with employees, and it may end up increasing the subordinates’ feedback orientation.
When selecting and recruiting new employees, it can be beneficial to assess and choose individuals with a higher feedback orientation. This can be especially impactful in the case of managers, as they have a crucial role in defining the feedback environment and may create a ripple effect towards a better feedback culture.
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References: Gabriel, A. S., Frantz, N. B., Levy, P. E., & Hilliard, A. W. (2014). The supervisor feedback environment is empowering, but not all the time: Feedback orientation as a critical moderator. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87, 487–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12060
Steelman, L. A., & Wolfeld, L. (2018). The Manager as Coach: The Role of Feedback Orientation. Journal of Business and Psychology, 33(1), 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-016-9473-6