Performance Feedback

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What Is Performance Feedback?

The extent to which performing a job provides an employee with clear and direct information about how well he or she has completed the job is referred to as feedback.

Performance feedback refers to the extent to which employees are provided with information about how well they are doing their jobs. It may come from a job itself, co-workers, immediate supervisors, clients or perhaps subordinates.

Other possible sources include performance appraisals, awards and promotions, and even personal evaluations of one’s own feelings and ideas.

To facilitate performance feedback, operative employees at Procter & Gamble’s Duncan Hines cake factory in Jackson, Tennessee, are given letters from customers who have had baking problems. The employees are responsible for calling the letter writers and figuring out what caused their problems. Tektronix goes one step further. Attached to every oscilloscope it sells is a card listing the names of the employees who built it, along with a toll-free telephone number where they can be reached.

Every day several calls are received from customers. The employees and their managers meet daily to discuss these calls and the possible need for further follow-up.

Importance of Performance Feedback

When feedback is frequent and constructive, employees develop a better understanding of the relationship between their efforts and the outcomes of their work. When feedback is insufficient, employees have little understanding of the value of their efforts.

Some organizations even provide customer feedback to their employees. Such feedback encourages employees to be more customer oriented in their work.

Solectron, the world’s largest contract equipment manufacturer, attributes much of its success to its system of providing comprehensive customer satisfaction feedback to its employees on a weekly basis.

Because the core dimensions of job design affect the extent to which jobholders find their work meaningful, feel responsibility for their efforts, and understand the relationship between their activities and the results of those activities, they have a significant effect on the commitment and attitudes of the jobholders.

Motivation Opens in new window, quality of job performance Opens in new window, job satisfaction Opens in new window, absenteeism Opens in new window, and turnover Opens in new window will all be a function of the core job dimensions to some degree. Consequently, managers should consider the effect of various job designs on each core dimension as they assign tasks and work activities to individuals within the organization.

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  • References
    • Motivating Employees Performance Feedback By Sharlyn J. Lauby
    • Management: Challenges for Tomorrow's Leaders Feedback By Pamela Lewis, Stephen Goodman, Patricia.

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