Job Feedback

Meaningful feedback is central to performance management. It guides, motivates, and reinforces effective behaviors and reduces or stops ineffective behaviors. However, while feedback is an important management tool, many people feel uncomfortable giving and receiving feedback. Givers may use this tool as a way to reinforce their self-image or manipulate how others see them rather than improve others' or their own performance. They may be destructive or hurtful intentionally or unintentionally, or biased by factors unrelated to actual performance and, as a result, convey useless information. Receivers of feedback may be apprehensive about being evaluated, defensive in the face of negative feedback, and/or apt to ignore information that could improve their performance.

This book describes how people give, seek, and use performance feedback. It examines processes by which givers of feedback perceive and judge performance, and outlines information processes by which receivers of feedback absorb --accept, deny, or ignore--and apply feedback. Formal sources of feedback are considered, including performance appraisal, multi-source (upward and 360 degree) survey feedback methods, and assessment centers. It also considers how individuals and groups receive informal feedback, including guidelines for how to give effective feedback under different conditions and how to hold people accountable for giving feedback.

Overall, the book shows how managers can be more effective in gathering and processing performance information about subordinates and feeding back this information in a way that is nonthreatening and leads to productive changes in behavior. It also demonstrates how employees can gather, accept, and use meaningful performance information to change their own behavior. In doing so, the book suggests how human resource practitioners and training professionals can help managers give and use feedback more effectively.