Feedback: how much control did the employee actually have?
How should a manager discuss inadequate work when its completion also depends on approvals, information or resources held elsewhere? For SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “L’art du feedback” programme, the question is how to establish accountability without overlooking the constraints of the role.
What the literature establishes
Lee Ross, Teresa M. Amabile and Julia L. Steinmetz (1977, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied a question-and-answer setting in which assigned roles gave the questioner a knowledge advantage. Judgements of participants’ general knowledge did not sufficiently account for that advantage. This finding draws attention to a specific difficulty in feedback: a difference created by the role can be interpreted as a difference between people.
Accounting for context takes additional work
Daniel T. Gilbert, Brett W. Pelham and Douglas S. Krull (1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed in social perception experiments that cognitive load could hinder the correction of an initial dispositional interpretation using situational information. In other words, noticing behaviour and adjusting a judgement to account for constraints are not necessarily a single operation. For managers, this suggests setting aside an explicit moment to examine dependencies rather than assuming they will be incorporated spontaneously.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that fair feedback should always attribute difficulties to the system. These studies do not support that conclusion: acknowledging a constraint does not establish whether the employee could have anticipated it, flagged it or reduced its effects. The useful question therefore becomes: what action was actually available, with what information and at what point? (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data do not demonstrate
These experiments concern social judgement, not the effectiveness of feedback conversations in Swiss organisations. They do not demonstrate that discussing constraints alone improves performance. In practice, such a discussion remains fragile if it relies solely on recollections: interpretations need to be checked against the requests, approvals and resources available when the work was done.
A practical check in Vevey
In Vevey, with its global food industry, group headquarters and Riviera SMEs, cross-departmental approvals provide a relevant setting for this check. As an application exercise for the “L’art du feedback” programme, review every instance of feedback about a missed deadline over one month, recording the expected action, the authority required and the date when the necessary information became available. Then calculate the proportion of these instances in which an action genuinely within the employee’s control is identified and supported by dated evidence, such as an email or an approval. This indicator does not measure overall feedback quality; it checks whether the accountability being sought corresponds to a documented opportunity to act. To go further: explore the The Art of Feedback training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: The Art of Feedback in Vevey
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