Feedback: can employees correct the facts?
A feedback conversation can be open to dialogue while leaving an assessment based on incomplete information unchanged. The management question is precise: what happens when an employee provides factual evidence that contradicts the feedback they have received?
What the literature establishes
Brian D. Cawley, Lisa M. Keeping and Paul E. Levy (1998, Journal of Applied Psychology) synthesised field studies on participation in performance appraisals and employee reactions. Their meta-analysis associates participation with more favourable reactions, including satisfaction and perceived fairness. It nevertheless distinguishes the opportunity to express one's views from participation intended to influence the outcome: these dimensions are not interchangeable.
Being heard does not mean securing a revision
Robert Folger (1977, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) experimentally studied the opportunity to express one's views in a pay allocation setting. This work shows that reactions to an allocation depend not only on its amount, but also on the procedure through which people can make their position heard. It sheds light on a mechanism relevant to feedback, without demonstrating that a right to respond makes an appraisal more accurate.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every feedback conversation simply needs to end with an invitation to respond. Yet an opportunity to speak does not, on its own, constitute a correction procedure. A manager can acknowledge a disagreement without changing their assessment; the issue is therefore to distinguish a judgement maintained after review from one shielded from any review. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data do not establish
The meta-analysis concerns reactions to appraisals, not an independent check of their accuracy, and the observed associations do not establish causality. The pay allocation experiment does not reproduce the ongoing relationship between a manager and an employee either. These studies therefore do not establish that a correction procedure improves performance; they provide grounds for distinguishing the quality of dialogue from the quality of the information used.
A practical check in Zurich
In Zurich's financial services, insurance, tech and European headquarters of international groups, feedback may draw on observations distributed across several teams or countries. As part of SHR's « L'art du feedback » programme, one possible exercise is to record requests for factual corrections and their handling over four weeks in a restricted-access log. The measure would be the proportion of all requests received that obtain a reasoned, traceable response — a correction, further verification or an explicit explanation for maintaining the assessment. This indicator measures neither feedback accuracy nor performance: it checks whether contradictory evidence is actually examined. To go further: explore the The Art of Feedback training in Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: The Art of Feedback in Zurich
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