Free Online Courses on Issues associated with 360 degree feedback  - 360 Degree Feedback as an Intervention

 

One dominant school of thought is that the use of 360-degree for performance and leadership-style is very risky, particularly as it seems to be dangerously naïve about the human preoccupation to create hierarchies, protect status, and retaliate. In other words, those who rate a boss or a peer may feel highly uncomfortable about giving candid feedback. It therefore takes a lot of preparation before an organization can progress from using 360 degree strictly for development purposes to using it for taking decisions on promotions and rewards. Many companies are just not ready.

 

Commonly associated issues with 360-degree feedback could be:

 

Trust: Trust is a paramount issue for which you need to bring in 360-degree feedback. If you have not been able to bring down the level of threat that senior managers are likely to face, the process is not going to work over a period of time. It therefore takes a lot of trust and preparation in an organization before you can move from using it for promotions and rewards. So the issue of trust is going to be paramount when this is going to be around.

 

Integrity: Integrity is another major issue. Now how does the CEO and other senior management get feedback about their behavior which crosses the line of integrity?  People who work with such kind of leaders are privy to information of how contracts are distributed, of how employees are recruited, promoted and rewarded. While they stay on in the company for various reasons, they get to be demoralized.

 

Leniency Error: Every evaluator has his or her own value system, which acts as a standard against which appraisals are made. Relative to the true or actual performance an individual exhibits, some evaluators mark high others low. The difficulty arises when we have different raters with different leniency errors making judgment.

 

Halo Error: The halo effect or error is a “tendency to rate high or low on all factors due to the impression of a high or low specific factors.” For example, if an employee tends to be conscientious and dependable, we might become biased towards that individual to the extent that we will rate him or her high on many desirable attributes.

 

Similarity Error: When evaluators rate other people in the same way that the evaluators perceive themselves, they are making a similarity error. Based on the perception that evaluators have of themselves, they project those perceptions onto others. This error would tend to wash out if the same evaluator appraised all the people in the organization.