Designing Feedback to Achieve Performance Improvement

This chapter examines ways to increase the value of job feedback for performance management and improvement. It establishes the foundation for understanding why feedback is important and how it can be structured and delivered to be accurate, accepted, and, most importantly, used to improve job performance. The chapter shows that how feedback can be beneficial and also how it can be detrimental to performance and the employee's sense of self-esteem. It considers the value of feedback to the individual employee, the team, and the organization, and the role of all of these perspectives to understanding how feedback is structured and operates. The chapter examines feedback from research and theories of learning and development that determine the effectiveness of feedback interventions. Goal setting and feedback are related to informal helping behaviors on the job as well as task job performance.