In Lugano, does corrective feedback actually improve performance?
Frontline managers regularly need to address a file, a customer response or an incomplete handover. The useful question is not whether to give more feedback, but under what conditions a corrective comment improves the next execution of the task.
What the literature establishes
Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996, Psychological Bulletin) show in a meta-analysis that feedback interventions improve performance on average, but can also undermine it. Their theoretical framework offers an explanation: effects depend in part on where feedback directs attention, from the task itself to concerns about the self. A comment that prompts personal defensiveness therefore does not necessarily have the same effect as information that can be used to correct the work.
From evaluation to usable information
John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007, Review of Educational Research) distinguish feedback focused on the task, processes, self-regulation and the person. Their review, situated in education, highlights the importance of connecting the intended goal, the current state of the work and the next step. For management, this distinction provides a practical hypothesis: explaining what is missing and how to check it could be more useful than making a general judgement about the employee.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that precise feedback is enough to improve performance. This overlooks the possibility that a correction can be understood without being feasible: instructions may conflict, a tool may be unavailable or a decision may rest with another department. Focusing feedback on the work therefore does not remove the manager's responsibility to check whether it can be acted upon. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The meta-analysis brings together heterogeneous interventions and tasks; it does not validate a universal feedback formula. The educational review does not, on its own, demonstrate that the same practice will have the same effects in a bank, a fashion or trading business, or an Italian-speaking family-owned SME in Lugano. Within SHR's « Management de proximité » programme, these studies can support an observational approach, not an automatic promise of better performance.
A practical check in Lugano
A local trial could select a recurring task — checking a banking file, updating a product record in fashion or handing over an order in trading — and define the acceptance criterion in writing, in Italian where it is the working language. During two weeks of baseline observation followed by a two-week trial, record the proportion of task executions meeting that criterion at the first check; during the trial, each correction would specify the observed discrepancy, the required action and how to verify it. In an Italian-speaking family-owned SME as elsewhere, results should remain aggregated at task level, with volumes and changes in difficulty recorded: an improvement would be a local signal, not causal proof. To go further: explore the Frontline Management training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Frontline Management in Lugano
- frontline management
- Lugano
- research
- training lugano