Does giving Negative performance feedback turn negative?

Dr. Priya Kalyanasundaram

Professor, Sankara Institute of Management Science

Why negative feedback to be avoided?

Negative feedback – though not a bad practice certainly it is a challenging one especially in a culture like ours, where we emphasis more on relationship building, negative feedback can affect our interpersonal relationship. Who wants to bell the cat? That is why there is a reluctance to give feedback. As it calls for an effort to tell a person that one has not performed well. Many of us fear of the reaction of the recipients, which can result in misrepresentation of performance review. Experts are cautious from calling it ‘negative’ instead of that they use words such as constructive or developmental feedback as the term negative may create a negative impact on the humanitarian principles, so positive feedback has been used as the best tool for performance management. However contrary to our assumptions and beliefs, negative feedback helps to deal with performance by creating different alternatives, also helps us in expanding our mental map and to maintain high task standards.

Regular feedback:

In today’s cut throat competition all organizations have aggressively started following a performance driven work culture, where employees have to think out of the box and to improve their competency level. Nowadays organisations are doing away with the annual performance system and are shifting towards continuous performance review process. Major companies like Accenture, KPMG, Dell have scrapped their once in a year ranking mechanism and started focussing on giving instant feedback after the completion of a task. The idea behind this is to foster a culture of continuous learning. The boss plays a major role by being more responsible while giving feedback to their subordinates. Here negative feedback becomes an important instrument to bring out their best performance. It is like a coaching process wherein task gaps are identified and suggestions are given to improve on them.

Positive impact of negative feedback:

Many researches in the field of feedback have revealed that negative feedback is more beneficial than positive feedback. It was also found that individuals with high self- efficacy and who believed in their abilities, negative feedback did not appear negative at all. The belief that one is able to improve performance helps in accepting a negative feedback. Though negative feedback appears to be a trump card in performance management, it also has its own limitations. When self becomes the measure of performance standard, negative feedback can thwart one’s self -image.