MGHC02H3 Lecture 6: Actionable Feedback & When Employees Don’t Get It
Performance Feedback
Actionable Feedback - Cannon and Witherspoon
• Actionable feedback - feedback that produces learning and tangible/appropriate results
(ex. Increase effectiveness or improve performance)
• Feedback improves learning and devel. b/c without it, can’t figure out how to improve
• Constructive feedback has greater specificity so can learn sooner
• Emotional and cognitive dynamics that make giving and receiving feedback difficult
o Emotional dynamics - how we feel
▪ Feedback is personal, can be charged with high levels of emotions
▪ Critical feedback produce strong emotions that hinder learning and devel.
o Cognitive dynamics - how we think
▪ Givers and receivers may have different ways of evaluating and
understanding behaviour which can cause disagreements in performance
ratings and feedback
• Emotional and cognitive dynamics that impact feedback receivers
o People tend to have self-serving bias - tend to see ourselves as responsible for
successes and blame others for failures
o Managers/observers have actor/observer bias - attribute failures to internal
causes (the subordinate themselves) than external/environ. Factors
o Subordinates can resist feedback if they think it is inaccurate, undermine
confidence and self-efficacy, or receive it as a personal attack
• Emotional and cognitive dynamics that impact feedback givers
o Produce poor feedback that evokes defensive reactions and limit actionability;
interfere with ability to assess the quality of own feedback
o 5 Flawed feedback types that can produces poor feedback that:
▪ Attacks the person rather than person’s behaviour
• Personal attack b/c it can criticize the person’s character that can
evokes strong defensive emotional reactions
• It is internal (blames the person rather than the situation) and
stable (consistent across situations)
• To fix this, begin message with “I” instead of “you” to focus less on
blaming and more on helping the person improve and focus on the
task to produce better results leading to constructive dialogue
▪ Vague or abstract assertions
• Feedback could be interpreted in different ways
▪ Without illustrations
• Feedback does not include examples of specific things individuals
can do to make feedback givers see them the same way they do
• To fix this will help with clarity
▪ Ill-defined range of applications
• Feedback is global (exhibited all the time or only certain
situations?)
• Feedback can produce defensiveness since recipient can think of
one or more situations when feedback does not apply causing
them to see it as inaccurate
▪ Unclear impact and implications for action
• Unclear why behaviour is problematic/the impact of the behaviour
so hard to infer what one needs to improve on
o 5 reasons for inability to assess feedback quality:
