George P. Hollenbeck
In the fall of 1995 I was one of the lucky ones David Bracken called when he was seeking participants for a program at the 1996 annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in San Diego. David was putting together a program that would deal with the tension between two main uses of 360-degree feedback: using it as a development tool for “assessed” managers and executives versus using it for administrative decision-making—serious things such as pay, promotion, and who goes on the fast track. David’s thought was that a debate at SIOP would be lively and informative and would get the issues out on the table. He sensed that the time was ripe.
How right he was: 360-degree feedback has become a major tool of modern organization management. We heard one colleague describe it as the greatest innovation in the field of I/O psychology in twenty-five years. If I/O psychology ever had a claim to 360-degree feedback, the technique has long since been commandeered by a wide range of practitioners. Who could begin to guess how many managers will be subjected to 360-degree feedback next year! Like it or not, 360-degree feedback has become an accepted fact in organizations today, and its use is still growing.
A recent experience illustrates this point: A month ago I attended a “training” session for executive coaches who would be providing 360-degree feedback to all of the managers and executives in a company with more than 50,000 employees. Sitting at my left around a conference table of twenty or so was the vendor who provided the statistical services for this company, as well as for many others. “Robert,” I asked, “has the fad peaked?” “Not on your life,” he replied with a smile on his face. “I am adding staff every month.”
If there is anyone left who needs to be reminded, 360-degree feedback is the process of “feeding back” to a person (usually a manager or executive) how others see him or her. The “others” are typically bosses, peers, and direct reports; sometimes they are others outside the immediate organization (for instance, internal or external customers). To quote from a BellSouth personal development guide produced in 1991: “You stand at the center of a circle of feedback sources. These sources are the people who know you best. They are the people whose opinions you trust; at work, at home, and in the community.” Although this description perhaps unduly emphasizes opinions you can trust, the various points (0 degrees, 90, 180, and so on) of this feedback “circle” is where the term 360 degrees came from. Although you will see in these papers a variety of favorite terms, such as upward feedback, multisource feedback (MSF), multi-rater feedback (MRF)—and these may satisfy the behavioral scientists’ need for precision—in fact, these terms have lost the battle of the popular press to the fetching ring of 360-degree feedback. And, worse yet for the purists, 360-degree feedback is widely used to describe feedback from whatever source, whether from the complete circle or not.
It is worth taking a few words to reflect on why 360-degree feedback has become so widely accepted now rather than twenty or forty years ago. After all, the basic survey methodology it uses has been in place since the 1950s, and equally early in our history the notion of using survey data to improve individual management performance was being explored. Maloney and Hinrichs (Personnel, July/August 1959; “A New Tool for Supervisory Self-development Personnel”) described a “new” tool for developing managers at Esso Research and Engineering Company that looks teasingly close to a current 360-degree instrument. It asks employees to rate their supervisor on such items as “Gives you room for individual initiative,” “Lets you know when he has criticisms of your work,” “Lets you make the decisions you should make”—all items that might appear on a form from the 1990s. What happened? Why didn’t 360 thrive in the 1950s? Primarily, I would argue, because “the boss was king” in those years, and “rate your manager” programs such as the one developed at Esso never took off. Several other pieces needed to be in place.
One of those pieces was the T-group movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although the unrestrained pursuit of “open communication” and “letting it all hang out” turned out to be too volatile for most organizations, the T-group thrust changed the climate. It popularized and made legitimate the theme that feedback is an important ingredient of change and a key element of system performance.
On a parallel track to T-groups, the growing body of research on performance appraisal indicated that subjective ratings by the boss left a great deal to be desired. As the hopes for traditional, trait-based performance appraisal faded, most companies shifted to some form of management by objectives (MBO)—the forerunner of what has today come to dominate under the term performance management. With objectives and measurement standards on the table, it was only a small step until measurement standards included not only what results were achieved but also how they were achieved.
A whole series of forces drove the change from what a manager gets done (results) to how he or she achieves those results (how he behaves, what he says, how he treats people, and so on). Some of these forces were: (1) a changing employee population, with better educated baby boomers expecting to be treated differently; (2) social legislation—EEOC, OSHA, EPA, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—placing constraints on how a company and its managers act; and (3) the changing nature of work; increasingly, the work that needed to get done was not manufacturing but technology, ideas, and information.
Another piece was the quality movement. Caught with their proverbial pants down, as foreign competition began making better products cheaper, companies in the U.S. began all-out efforts to catch up. Suddenly, everyone was a customer—not just those who buy our products but other departments, suppliers, even our employees. And surveys could provide the data to answer the question, “How am I doing?”
U.S. companies’ drive to compete brought forth yet another piece, namely newer organizational forms such as teams, flatter organizations, and real decentralization in boundaryless organizations. With spans of control or influence that might cover seventy-five employees or customers scattered throughout the globe, traditional “supervision” was no longer possible. With new pressures to find out what your managers were doing, new ways were needed to find out what was going on.
One more piece and I rest my case. A result, or a part of, the “new organization” is the much-described “new employment contract” that shifts the burden of keeping up onto the shoulders of the employee: Companies don’t develop managers anymore; managers develop themselves. Companies no longer promise employment; they promise employability. And if I as a manager am responsible for driving my own development, then I need data (feedback) to plan my course. Given the fact that my boss has, since time began, been reluctant or unable to provide very good data, what better tool than 360-degree feedback?
No doubt the reader can fill in the whole of my analysis with additional pieces. The fact is that eventually, as the most admired executive in the U.S., GE’s hard-nosed Jack Welch, has been heard to say, GE executives can get fired for what they do as well as what gets done; results are no longer enough. What better tool than 360-degree feedback to inform us about what an executive does?
It is not surprising that, given its multiple origins, there is disagreement over how 360-degree feedback should be used today. The presenters, skillfully chosen by Bracken, effectively represent the major positions in the dispute. Maxine Dalton of the Center for Creative Leadership is, I suspect, a natural-born defender of the development side; her passion for development comes through in her paper. Vicki Pollman has “seen it all” at places such as Texaco, and that perspective is revealed in her presentation. David Bracken, with his experience as co-founder of the Upward Feedback Forum, a consortium of more than twenty companies sharing issues on 360-degree feedback, reflects the desire of consulting clients to use data to evaluate. Robert Jako has hands-on experience in the nation’s largest medical-delivery organization, Kaiser Permanente.
As the moderator, I saw my mission as making sure that the positions were clearly delineated so that the audience could more easily follow the spoken debate. To this end, I asked each of our presenters to make bald statements, which they did. In preparing their remarks for printed publication they have naturally modified some of these remarks. It is only fair for me to share the blame for any overstatements that might remain.