The Power of 360? Feedback

Leanne E. Atwater, Ph.D., David A. Waldman, Ph.D.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136356353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Now learn from two seasoned consultants how to implement the 360° feedback process effectively--whatever the size and history of your organization. Packed with case studies and the authors' real-life consulting experiences, this book examines the successes and problems of 360° and upward feedback implementation efforts in more than 15 organizations, including Motorola, AT&T, Federal Express, Raychem, Colgate-Palmolive, and UPS.The book objectively considers such crucial components of 360° feedback as organizational culture and performance, pros and cons, the impact on the individual employee, and whether the feedback should be used for evaluative or developmental purposes. Models and tables lend a visual dimension to the book's concepts. Sample surveys and feedback reports--including the authors' own TEAM-Q survey and report set--show you what types of questions to ask and how to present feedback most effectively. If your comp any is considering adopting its own 360° feedback program, don't start before you read this book!

CHAPTER 1

The Surge of 360°
Feedback Programs:
Benefits and Risks

“Followers don't know anything about leadership.” These words came from a high-ranking U.S. Navy officer. He held the view that bosses know about leadership and are in the best position to judge whether a subordinate is a good leader. This wisdom prevailed in the late 1970s.

Managers and academics alike have come a long way in the past fifteen years in terms of their thinking about who should best evaluate leadership and, in fact, have begun to recognize that followers, peers, and customers, as well as superiors, know quite a bit about leadership. Even the U.S. Navy has made some progress in this area, although, like battleships, those old traditions do not die easily.

Today an estimated 20 to 25 percent of organizations actually ask followers, peers, and/or customers to rate managers, for developmental and learning purposes, and in some cases, performance evaluation purposes.¹ This approach to evaluation is referred to as 360° feedback. A similar though less inclusive process called upward feedback asks subordinates to rate superiors but does not include ratings from peers or customers.

Of Fortune's thirty-two most-admired companies in 1994, twenty were using upward (followers rating leaders) or 360° feedback, and two companies were implementing such programs. Indeed, Fortune 500 companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually for feedback programs. In many ways, this has not only inverted the pyramid in that now managers look to employees for their input, but 360° feedback also asks for input from those above, that is, bosses; those below, or subordinates; those in comparable positions, that is, peers; and even internal and external customers. The term 360° refers to the circular view from all these positions around the target individual. Table 1-1 presents a list of companies that have adopted an upward or 360° feedback process for informing and/or evaluating managers. As can be seen, the types of organizations using 360° or upward feedback vary widely. Additionally, the process is not confined to the corporate giants; smaller companies as well are joining the trend.

At a basic level, the 360° feedback process usually involves the following steps. First, an organization identifies a number of managerial behaviors that it believes are important to its success and that others can observe. Next, each manager taking part in the process is rated by his or her followers, peers, customers, and superiors on some type of scale, usually via anonymous survey. However, in the case of ratings by superiors, responses can only be anonymous if the manager has more than one boss. Finally, the manager receives the survey responses in a report. Often, the average score for each group of raters appears on the report. As a result, raters get the opportunity to anonymously evaluate a manager, and the manager receives this feedback as information he or she might want to incorporate into future behaviors. Numerous variations exist regarding matters such as length and type of survey, how anonymity is assured, whether managers provide self-reports, how reports are prepared, how feedback is provided, subsequent management training, and follow-up. However, the primary goal is generally the same, that is, to improve leadership/management.

SAMPLE CASES

As noted above, the implementation of 360° feedback has grown steadily. It is beyond the scope of this book to cite all the existing cases, and indeed, not all have been researched or documented. However, some examples will be briefly described here to give the reader a quick feel for 360° feedback, including where it has been implemented and what it should accomplish.

Table 1-1
Companies That Have Recently Used 360° or Upward Feedback

Acuson Inc.	Levi Strauss
Alcoa	Libby-Owens-Ford Co.
Amoco	Limited Credit Services
AT&T	Lockheed Martin
Ball-InCon	Massachusetts Mutual Life
Bank of America	Insurance Co.
BellSouth	Merck
Ben & Jerry's	Motorola
Borden Foods	Nestlé
Caterpillar	Nortel Inc.
Chase Manhattan Bank	Pacific Gas and Electric
Chrysler	Pitney Bowes
Colgate-Palmolive Co.	PRC (of Litton Industries)
Deloitte & Touche	Proctor and Gamble
Consulting Group	Raychem Corp.
Disney	Rhone-Poulenc Agriculture
DuPont	Scottsdale Insurance
Eastman Kodak Co.	Shell Oil
Exxon	Stride Rite Corp.
FAA	Syntex
Federal Express Corp.	Tenneco
Ford Motor Company	Texaco
General Mills	3M
General Motors	TRW
GTE Corp.	United Airlines
Heller Financial	UPS
Hewlett Packard	Warner-Lambert Co.
IBM	Wells Fargo Bank
Johnson & Johnson	World Bank
Kaiser Permanente	Xerox

Heller Financial in Chicago attempted to implement 360° feedback in the late 1980s as a means of building a more empowered culture.² Heller's executive team feared the culture that existed at the time was unparticipative and did not encourage speedy responses to customer needs. At the same time, the company wanted to maintain a strong results orientation. An upward feedback process was launched at top management levels and eventually cascaded to lower levels, with the goal of increasing participation by giving subordinates the chance to provide feedback to their managers.

Other similar examples abound. Ball-InCon, a glass manufacturer in Indiana, adopted a combination of subordinate and peer feedback in an attempt to build quality and empowerment deep into the company's culture.³ Similarly, Motorola has used 360° feedback to ensure that executive behavior aligns with the company's values and culture. AT&T has put thousands of managers through an upward and/or broader 360° feedback process in recent years. For example, at AT&T's business products division, any manager supervising three or more employees goes through an annual 360° feedback process and must share the results with colleagues both up and down the organizational hierarchy.⁴ The Arizona Department of Public Safety, which includes the state's highway patrol, has implemented upward feedback with its police leaders in an attempt to increase empowerment and promote a prevention-oriented, problem-solving approach to policing. As the examples above illustrate, 360° feedback can help accomplish a variety of goals, including leadership development, culture change, and increased participation. Companies can also encourage specific desired behaviors by designing survey items to address target areas.

In sum, 360° feedback has spread quickly across the organizational landscape. However, questions remain as to exactly what such feedback efforts can be reasonably expected to accomplish and under what conditions. To understand why 360° feedback has become so popular, as well as its potential for success–and, as will be seen, potential for failure–360° feedback must be placed within a strategic and organizational context.

360° FEEDBACK IN CONTEXT

A key theme of this book is the need for each organization that is considering the implementation of 360° feedback to understand its 360° feedback program within a context. Two issues are relevant to context. First, 360° feedback is in line with recent management trends such as total quality management (TQM) and high-involvement organizations. Proponents of TQM have criticized traditional performance appraisal approaches, which place predominant emphasis on top-down feedback and evaluation. Broadening feedback input to include 360° sources would be more congruent with TQM. Moreover, proponents of high-involvement organizations have extolled the virtues of gaining more input from employees. Organizations need mechanisms or programs to make high involvement come to life. A formalized 360° feedback program is one such mechanism.

Second, formalized 360° feedback can be considered an offshoot or close cousin of a more established type of organizational development (OD) program–survey/feedback. Indeed, survey/feedback has been around for a long time in organizations as a widescale technique associated with OD. Typically, the survey includes a wide range of attitudinal issues, including job satisfaction, work conditions, and benefits, as well as aspects of supervision or leadership. Management then uses this survey information to diagnose problems and design solutions.

Formalized 360° feedback is a type of survey feedback. It focuses specifically on the appraisal of managers by their subordinates, peers, customers, and superiors based on critical competencies associated with supervision or leadership. In addition, as compared with more established forms of survey/feedback, 360° feedback programs have more specific relevance to managers’ performances and perhaps their evaluations and outcomes. Thus, with 360° feedback the target for change is clearly the manager, rather than organizational policies or job design issues.

FEEDBACK AND SELF-PERCEPTION

The rationale behind using 360° feedback to improve leadership/management rests with notions of self-perception. Feedback has been found to increase the accuracy of self-perception, as well as to give individuals information about how others perceive their behavior. This awareness can inform the leader about the need for behavior change. If the leader never receives feedback, the self-perception may remain inaccurate or uninformed, and thus the leader does not make necessary behavior modifications.

For example, Raychem's CEO Robert Saldich obtained feedback from his team revealing that his subordinates were aware of his weakness in contingency planning, something he thought he had kept well hidden. Joe Malik, manager of a team of engineers at AT&T, got nicked for his vigorous temper, which was not a big revelation to him. However, Malik was surprised to learn through upward feedback that his subordinates expected him to articulate the vision of the unit, something he had never imagined his people wanted.⁵

A long history of research suggests that people do not evaluate themselves accurately–or at least not in line with how others view them. Numerous researchers have documented that self-ratings of behavior, personality, and other job performance categories suffer from unreliability and bias, and generally are suspect and inaccurate when compared with ratings provided by others or with other objective measures.⁶ And generally–although not always–the self-perceptions people have reflect positive biases.

Self-perception is often inaccurate because of a lack of information, fueled by individuals’ tendencies to withhold negative feedback from others. It is well documented that most individuals do...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 The Surge of 360° Feedback Programs: Benefits and Risks
• CHAPTER 2 HR Innovation vs. Organizational Change Effort
• CHAPTER 3 Examples of Strategic Implementation Problems
• CHAPTER 4 Why Do Organizations Implement 360° Feedback?
• CHAPTER 5 How Does 360° Feedback Impact Individual Performance?
• CHAPTER 6 What Is the Connection to Organizational Culture?
• CHAPTER 7 Does 360° Feedback Impact Organizational Performance?
• CHAPTER 8 What Is the Future of 360° Feedback?
• APPENDIX A Typical 360° Feedback Survey Items and Report
• APPENDIX B Typical TEAM-Q Survey Items and Feedback Report
• Index