Jon Krispin's contribution is a rather remarkably compressed introduction
to behavioral psychology. As a motivational (personality) psychologist
and former consultant, I think I'd like to take what he wrote and boil it
down for application purposes, with a motivational twist.
1. People respond better to positive feedback than negative; a ratio of
4:1 is about right. But they need a range to know that there is true
variation, and they need a link to real results to believe that it
describes them accurately.
2. This does not mean that every fifth comment to an employee is
negative; it means the proportions overall are 4 to 1. This is an
average. In situations where an employee fails, a different ratio (say,
1:4 or even worse) is entirely appropriate for that situation, as long as
the average over time comes out to 4:1. Likewise, exceptional performance
in a situation may result in 8:1 positives in a given circumstance.
3. In my experience, managers typically either give far more negative
than positive (no news is good news) or give vague, generalized positive
feedback thinking that it is motivating ("hey--you're good").
4. Reinforcers must be linked to specific behaviors/actions or they will
not reinforce anything. "Good job" only works if you know what job it
applies to.
5. Feedback that is consistently one-way loses its impact. Since there
is no range, people cease to see it as meaningful and applicable, since
they know their performance varies. That applies to perpetual positives
OR perpetual negatives. The former causes people to disbelieve the
sincerity ("I could blow up my computer and he'd say 'good job!'"), the
latter causes hostility toward the giver of feedback because the comments
are perceived as personal rather than professional ("she just doesn't like
me").
Motivational theory indicates that effectively motivated people look at
both positives and negatives, and that the balance is more important than
either alone. In the interest of brevity I won't pull out the Atkinson
Problem-Solving model or my empirically derived modifications of it at
this time, but I found that people of a given motivational status tended
to think along more positive or more negative lines, depending, and that
this was directly derived from recent life experience. In other words,
people with positive experiences were trusting and positively focused
towards life and others and vice versa. (Actually I identified three
categories--Trusting, Mistrusting/Cynical, and Anxious, but the latter two
are both negatively focused.)
Steve Kelner, Ed.M, Ph.D
Director, Educational and Advising Services
Center for Quality of Management
www.cqm.org
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