Organizational Development Article: Intervention Round Up-360 Feedback

During an Organizational Development class, it was asked about our take on models that seeks to engage stakeholders within a corporate environment and during the class we needed to interact via an online discussion. Every once in a while, we have to pose questions to one another, in this post I have posted the question and my response to that question. I hope the interactions below assist in research, or even understanding the concepts of the different models that engage stakeholders in a positive manner and what from some academic sense future practitioners think of these concepts and the arenas it can be used in.

Question: The 360 Feedback tool which I think is overused and overcommitted to as a tool to provide feedback. The problem often comes from misperceptions as to what 360 is and how it can be effectively used to advance employee effectiveness.
Not to take a reductionist stance, but in essence evaluation must have a clear and focused context and a process that is consistent and valuable for everyone, not just a supervisor. Also, consider the variance between a transformational 360 feedback session versus a transactional session.

Most of my experiences with 360 Feedback as a process comes from supervisors using the process as a corrective actions tool, emphasizing more of the negative aspects of my performance than including the feedback from myself or my peers.

Most of my coworkers and I would joke that it is called 360 Feedback because the process just runs the employee around in circles (360 degrees) without having any point to it. The only person who could make sense of this process was maybe the supervisor, who had an opportunity created by the one-way feedback session a scape goat.

Usually when I experienced or heard (from other employees) about this one-way feedback process, the purpose it seemed was to find the easiest person to blame for the team not meeting productivity goals. This process was filled, non- transformational sessions that caused more division and chaos than necessary and creates the misperception that the process is not for advancing employee effectiveness as you stated, but to punish.

I hope to be able to use resources such as my schoolwork, textbooks and the interactions with you and my fellow classmates to find ways to enlighten and teach organizational management in the future on the proper way to use the 360 Feedback process.