Why Feedback Matters...Even if it's not the good kind

In my first semester as an MBA student I wrote three different double-digit page research papers for the three classes that I was taking at the time.  All of them were interesting topics to me in some way, which I think is the only way to really produce good work/content, but there was one in particular that really hit home for me.  The topic of the paper was on job satisfaction in the restaurant industry, which is the industry that I have spent most of my time being employed within over the past four years, as well as most of my college career.  It was interesting to me to study job satisfaction in the industry, because I believed from my experience that it was really an afterthought of most managers due to the statistically high turnover that has always been associated with the profession.

One article interested me in particular, and I felt that it was extremely applicable to any industry when it comes to improving employee performance.  The article is entitled "If You Don't Hear From Me You Know You Are Doing Fine": The Effects of Management Nonresponse to Employee Performance, and it talks about the impact that feedback from management can have on employee performance via a study of 243 employees of two different hospitality organizations.  The findings of the study indicated that feedback, even when it is of the negative variety, improves employee performance.  The study also found that ommission of positive commentary on good performance had a slightly negative effect on workers' effectiveness and job satisfaction. 

My Mother and Father used to tell me that 'if I didn't have anything nice to say, I shouldn't say anything at all,' but it seems that the moral of the story is that management needs to spend more time giving any kind of feedback to employees that they can.  Despite everything that is going on within an organization, and all of the other responsibilities that management of that organization will have throughout each day, one of the best ways to spend your time might just be in providing some feedback, regardless of if it's positive or negative...and especially if it's positive.