288. Research: We Drop People Who Give Us Critical Feedback

Research: We Drop People Who Give Us Critical Feedback By Francesca Gino Think about the people at work who are part of your network — the individuals who help you improve your performance or provide you with emotional support when you are going through a tough spell. If you’re like most people, the colleagues who come to mind are those you get along with and who have a good impression of you. But has anyone in your network actually given you tough feedback? Your likely answer is “not many.” As I discovered in recent research I conducted with Paul Green of Harvard Business School and Brad Staats of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, people tend to move away from those who provide feedback that is more negative than their view of themselves. They do not listen to their advice and prefer to stop interacting with them altogether. It seems that people tend to strengthen their bonds with people who only see their positive qualities. In one of our studies, we used four years of archival data on over 300 full-time employees at a United States-based food manufacturing and agribusiness company. The company has a fluid structure that gives employees some discretion in defining the scope, responsibilities, and deliverables of their role on an annual basis. Employees also are responsible for providing feedback to coworkers. In fact, there is no managerial review processes. Every year, each employee completes a self-evaluation and reviews each of his or her identified colleagues from the past year. The online self-evaluation and peer-review questionnaires are identical (e.g., evaluating oneself and others on dimensions such as “Leadership & Initiative,” “Communication and Coordination,” and “Organizational Skill”), and the latter leaves room for constructive comments. To examine how employees responded to feedback they received from others in their work networks, we looked at data from this peer-review process and from the organization’s annually collected data on each employee’s existing network. We focused on relationships that were discretionary — those that employees can voluntarily continue or drop based on the specific projects or initiatives they choose to undertake. (They don’t have that choice for obligatory relationships — those with employees who share a job function or are in the same functional area.) We found that in the year following feedback, an employee was more likely to eliminate someone from his or her network who offered “disconfirming” feedback (i.e., feedback that is more negative than one’s own self-evaluation) than a reviewer who provided “confirming” feedback. More specifically, when a colleague’s review was one point lower on a seven-point scale than one’s own self-review, the employee was 44% more likely to drop the relationship with that colleague.