1. General Introduction
1.2 Beneficial Feedback Properties
What are key characteristics of beneficial feedback? The probably most comprehen-sive answer to this question today might be summarized in the feedback environment con-cept (Levy & Williams, 2004; Steelman et al., 2004) that embraces important contextual characteristics of the feedback process. A good feedback environment is the basis for fruitful feedback interactions and processes in an organization (Anseel & Lievens, 2007; Steelman et al., 2004).
Parallel to these developments in feedback environment research, the relevance of organizational fairness, and even more recently, of fairness of leader behavior became a stream of research with growing importance (van Knippenberg, de Cremer, van Knippen-berg, 2007). Although we know that people care about fair treatment (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, 2001), and feedback research (e.g., llgen et al., 1979) has already identi-fied fairness (e.g., accuracy) as important factor for feedback acceptance, there is no sys-tematic research about feedback and fairness established until today. Feedback fairness was recognized by McDowall and Fletcher (2004) as important for the feedback-performance re-lationship. Results from Leung, Su, and Morris (2001) showed a positive relationship be-tween procedurally fair feedback and feedback acceptance, and Roberson and Steward (2006) found a positive relationship between procedural feedback fairness and the motivation to improve. Most importantly, fairness is known to satisfy self-relevant needs (Cropanzano et al., 2001). Thus, fairness of feedback might be important for our understanding of the feed-back process.
Both, the feedback environment and feedback fairness constructs are separately in-troduced below. In the discussion section (Chapter 5), I point out important similarities be-tween these two concepts.
1.2.1 Feedback Environment
The feedback environment is characterized as “the contextual or situational charac-teristics of the feedback process. The feedback environment refers to the contextual aspects of day-to-day supervisor-subordinate and coworker-coworker feedback processes.” (Steel-man et al., 2004, p. 166). Seven aspects of the feedback environment are focused, namely (1) source credibility characterized by the expertise and trustworthiness of the source, (2) feedback quality which is marked of perceived consistency and usefulness of the feedback,
(3) feedback delivery with positive intentions and consideration, (4) favorable and (5) unfa-vorable feedback which refer to whether positive and negative feedback is received when performance warrants this kind of feedback, (6) source availability, and (7) promotion of feed-back seeking by the respective source.
Evidently, this construct of the feedback environment covers a wide range of impor-tant feedback facets. Since the article of Steelman et al. (2004) has been published several authors have adopted the construct and measure. Positive relationships were found between the feedback environment and positive outcomes at work, including satisfaction with feed-back, motivation to use feedfeed-back, feedback-seeking frequency and leader-member ex-change (LMX) (Steelman et al., 2004), organizational citizenship behavior mediated by affec-tive commitment (Norris-Watts & Levy, 2004), managers’ accountability of using upward feedback and self-development initiative (Rutkowski & Steelman, 2005), perceptions of poli-tics, job satisfaction, affective commitment and performance (Rosen, Levy, & Hall, 2006), and job satisfaction mediated by LMX (Anseel & Lievens, 2007).
These positive findings underline the relevance of a good feedback environment for positive work-related outcomes. Apparently, in a good feedback environment feedback is readily available as a beneficial resource. Study 1 (Chapter 2) was conducted to learn more about the feedback environment - well-being relationship. Concerning mediating mecha-nisms, personal control and the experienced absence of control, namely perceived helpless-ness, were examined. Personal control can be defined as “a psychological construct reflect-ing an individual’s beliefs, at a given point in time, in his or her ability to effect a change, in a desired direction, on the environment” (Greenberger & Strasser, 1986, p. 165). Personal con-trol is known as a good predictor of well-being (Skinner, 1996) that allows individuals to show active engagement within the work environment rather than being reactive and passive (Pe-terson, 1999) or as Bandura (2000, p. 18) points it out “unless people believe they can pro-duce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act.” Actually, possessing personal control is a central characteristic of happy people (Myers & Diener, 1995). There-fore, personal control seemed to be a central mechanism that connects the feedback envi-ronment with well-being at work.
1.2.2 Fairness of Feedback
Organizational fairness is concerned with “people’s perceptions of fairness in organi-zations” (Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005, p. xi). Similarly, fairness of feedback can be defined as people’s perceptions of feedback fairness. Four dimensions of organizational fairness have been identified, namely distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational fairness (Colquitt, 2001; Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001). Distributive fairness was the first dimension that received research attention and is defined as fairness of important out-comes at work (e.g., pay) regarding to particular norms (e.g., equity, equality, needs).
Sub-sequently, the importance of procedural fairness was discovered, referring to the fairness of the procedures by which the outcomes are derived (e.g., giving voice to recipients, consistent and unbiased application of decision rules). Later, interactional fairness was treated as an important fairness aspect related to but distinct from procedural fairness, referring to the fair-ness of the treatment people receive when procedures are implemented. Nowadays, interac-tional fairness is divided into two separate aspects, namely interpersonal fairness, character-ized by respectful treatment, and informational fairness, charactercharacter-ized by adequate explana-tions of procedures and decisions. Although it is not indisputable whether these dimensions should be treated as separable as they tend to correlate rather highly (Colquitt, Greenberg, &
Scott, 2005) in this dissertation I adopted these dimensions for feedback fairness. Accord-ingly, distributive fair feedback adequately reflects the individual’s efforts, performance, and results at work. Procedural feedback fairness refers to feedback derived by processes that rely on accurate information and that are free from bias. Interpersonal feedback fairness re-fers to polite and respectful treatment of the feedback recipient by the feedback source. Fi-nally, feedback is informational fair when the feedback message is adequately explained and the feedback source communicates the feedback sincerely.
Organizational justice research has found positive relationships of fairness with a broad array of desirable outcomes like job satisfaction, in-role and extra-role performance, and commitment (Colquitt et al., 2001; Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001). A meta-analysis of studies examining contingent and non-contingent leader rewards (Podsakoff, Bommer, Pod-sakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006) showed that contingent rewards (i.e., rewards that are directly connected with the recipient’s behavior) were positively related to employee fairness percep-tions and negatively related to role ambiguity. Moreover, contingent rewards were positively related to employee motivation and performance. Feedback also can be considered as a reward (Ashford & Cummings, 1983) and if this feedback is provided contingently to one’s behavior, enhanced fairness perceptions, and subsequently more positive behavior at work are likely. Van Knippenberg and colleagues (2007) conclude from their review that leader fairness matters to employees and that there is good news in that leader fairness can be trained (e.g., Greenberg, 2006; Skarlicki & Latham, 2005). In this dissertation, these conclu-sions are translated to fairness of feedback. As feedback delivery is an important leadership task (Leung et al., 2001) and fairness of leader behavior has been shown to be positively related to desirable outcomes (van Knippenberg et al., 2007) examining fairness of feedback seems to be promising.
Two studies were conducted in order to address both well-being and work behavior as outcomes of supervisor feedback fairness. While LMX was examined as a mediator in the relationship between fairness of feedback and well-being at work, thinking about task details after feedback reception was examined as a moderator of the fairness of feedback - work
behavior relationships. Fairness is an important aspect in exchange relationships including LMX (e.g., Roch & Shanock, 2006; Stinglhamber, De Cremer, & Mercken, 2006). LMX is examined as an important mechanism that connects fairness of feedback to well-being in Study 2 (Chapter 3). Moreover, as the relationship between feedback and performance out-comes is not consistent, feedback intervention theory and considerations about feedback fairness are combined in testing the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between feedback fairness and personal initiative and innovative work behavior contingent on the in-dividual’s tendency to think about task details based on feedback received (Study 3, Chapter 4). Although beneficial feedback might directly contribute to employee well-being, I assume that its contribution to positive work behavior is dependent on focusing the attention to details of the tasks.
In summary, this dissertation’s studies’ theoretical contribution is the systematic com-bination of supervisor feedback and fairness. The empirical contribution consists of connect-ing feedback fairness and the feedback environment to important outcomes, and the explora-tion of important mechanisms of these relaexplora-tionships.