IMPACT OF FEEDBACK ON JOB PERFORMANCE AND JOB SATISFACTION - Essay Example

However, if pay raises are related directly to performance, an employee who receives a healthy pay increase will more than likely also experience feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. On the other hand, feedback is the information people receive about their performance. It conveys an evaluation about the quality of their performance behaviors. Giving feedback could be done by providing information to employees regarding their performance on job expectations. This makes feedback is an important part of the education process.

For instance, in the school environment, test grades let students know what they have achieved and what they must learn to do better next time. People at work give feedback to reinforce others' good behavior and correct their poor behavior. The recipient of feedback judges its value and determines whether to accept and act on the feedback, reject it, or ignore it. Feedback has different purposes at different career stages. It helps newcomers learn the ropes, mid-career employees to improve performance and consider opportunities for development, and late career employees to maintain their productivity.

Managers are an important source of feedback because they establish performance objectives and provide rewards for attaining those objectives. Other sources of feedback are co-workers, subordinates, and customers (London, 2003, p. 11).The impact of feedback on job satisfaction could be derived in the fact that it is linked to the psychological reception of an employee. Cullen and Sackett (2003) cited Hackman and Oldham's job characteristics model that has identified the five core task dimensions-task identity, task variety, autonomy, task significance, and feedback-are seen in a number of psychological states, such as job satisfaction and subsequent organizational events (like absence and turnover).

Research has indeed established that these attributes are useful predictors of job satisfaction (Cullen & Sackett, 2003, p. 169). The problem with feedback is that, generally, people tend to perceive and recall positive feedback more accurately than they do negative feedback. However, as opposed to what many people think, a feedback with a negative sign (e.g., being told your performance is below average) can have a positive motivational impact. In fact, when employees are told they were below average on a creativity test, they subsequently drove to outperform those who were led to believe their results were above average.

This is why negative feedbacks can serve as a challenge and could motivate employees to pursue higher goals. Those receiving positive feedback apparently were less motivated to do better. Nonetheless, feedback with a negative sign or threatening content needs to be administered carefully to avoid creating insecurity and defensiveness. Self-efficacy also can be damaged by negative feedback, as discovered in a pair of experiments with business students. With this, Louie (1999) concluded that "to facilitate the development of strong efficacy beliefs, managers should be careful about the provision of negative feedback.

Destructive criticism by managers which attributes the cause of poor performance to internal factors reduces both the beliefs of self-efficacy and the self-set goals of recipients."The traditional top-down feedback programs have now been replaced by two newer approaches, the upward