Some might say there are two types of bosses.
Certain bosses manage people by calling attention to the things they’ve done
wrong. This, they believe, is the best way to improve employee performance.
Other bosses, preferred by most workers, manage via encouragement – commending
employees on the things they’ve done right and never missing an opportunity to
offer praise when praise is deserved.
Which is a more effective style of management?
New research forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science
may have an answer.
A team of researchers led by Lauren
Eskreis-Winkler of the University of Chicago designed an experiment to test
which form of managerial feedback would produce better outcomes.
Overwhelmingly, they found that management via encouragement was the more
effective method.
“Our society celebrates failure as a teachable
moment,” state Eskreis-Winkler and her team. “Yet we find that failure does the
opposite: it undermines learning. Failure feedback undermines learning
motivation because it is ego-threatening. It causes participants to tune out
and stop processing information.”
To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers
recruited 422 telemarketers from a call center company in the Midwest to
participate in a short online study. In the study, the telemarketers were asked
to answer ten trivia questions regarding customer service and customer
satisfaction. Each question had two answers. For instance, one question read,
“How much money, annually, do U.S. companies lose due to poor customer
service?” The answers were: (a) approximately $90 billion or (b) approximately
$60 billion.”
The catch was this: participants were randomly
assigned to receive either success- or failure-oriented feedback. For
participants receiving success-oriented feedback, the message “Your answer was
correct” was shown after each correct answer (but no more than four times,
total). For participants receiving failure-oriented feedback, the message “Your
answer was incorrect” was shown after each incorrect answer (again, no more than
four times, total).
The researchers then asked participants to
re-answer the four questions they had been given feedback on, but with one
minor alteration. The questions were phrased in the reverse (for example,
“Which of the following amounts is NOT the amount that U.S. companies lose
annually due to poor customer service?”). The researchers then calculated the
percentage of rephrased questions participants’ answered correctly.
They found that telemarketers who were given
success-oriented feedback were significantly more likely to respond correctly
to the rephrased questions. Specifically, participants given success-oriented
feedback answered 62% of the rephrased questions correctly while participants
given failure-oriented feedback answered only 48% correctly.
Next, the researchers attempted to uncover the
source of the effect. They designed a similar study to the one described above,
with one important caveat. They added a scenario in which participants acted as
an observer in the learning experience (that is, they were asked to learn from
another person’s success- or failure-oriented feedback). Under these
conditions, the researchers replicated their previous results (that success
feedback prompted greater increases in learning than failure feedback) when
participants received feedback themselves. However, when participants observed
others receiving feedback and were asked to learn from it, the researchers
found that both types of feedback were equally beneficial in promoting
learning. The researchers write, “In sum, the more failure is removed from the
self, the less people tune out, and the more they learn from it.”
The authors conclude, “Our key result is that
people find failure feedback ego-threatening, which leads them to tune out, and
miss the information it offers. In other words, failure undermines learning.
[...] Tuning out from a pursuit in the moment of failure could be the first
step in a chain reaction that distances and discourages people from the goal
they are pursuing.”
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