2013,1 (62) - Klaipėdos universitetas

Anne Koskiniemi, Juha Perttula
is important to know how people interpret perceived information and associate new
information with former knowledge (Ashford, Blatt & VandeWalle, 2003).
Feedback studies from a recipient's viewpoint have focused on the impacts of leader-member
exchange on communication satisfaction (Mueller & Lee, 2002), feedback
orientation (Dahling, Chau & O'Malley, 2010; Linderbaum & Levy, 2010) feedback
received from supervisors (Berlin, 2008; Chakrabarty et al., 2008), the effects of
self-regulatory strategies on feedback (Oettingen et al., 2012) and associations of
feedback with students’ performance and self-evaluation (Plakht, Shiyovich, Nusbaum
& Raizer, 2012). Furthermore, feedback environments that emphasize informal aspects
over formal ones have been reformed (Steelman et al., 2004), and connections
between feedback environment, seeking feedback (Whitaker, 2011) and behaviour in
organizations (Peng & Chiu, 2010) have been studied.
The focus of this study on received positive feedback is derived from our everyday
observation that people interpret it very differently. Consequently, the effects of given
positive feedback may vary a lot. Furthermore, we found it interesting to study interpretations
of positive feedback among those employees who work as leaders even
though they do not have a formal managerial position in the organization. They are
often called team leaders. A team leader is an employee who is responsible for varied
information exchange between managers and team members. A team leader is chosen
by the team itself for a period of time.
The purpose of this study is to understand how employees who do not hold a formal
managerial position in their organization interpret receiving positive feedback.
The aim is to describe the core meanings of team leaders’ experiences in receiving
positive feedback in their everyday work. The research question is: How do team leaders
in a public organization experience the positive feedback they have received in
their current work?
The theoretical definition of positive feedback was not established before performing
the empirical study because our interpretation of positive feedback considers it to be subjectively
experienced. Moreover, being consistent with the research design, we requested
that team leaders themselves identify the situations in which they have experienced receiving
positive feedback at work. Nevertheless, two restrictions for work situations were set:
they must belong to their present work, and the source of positive feedback had to be either
from members or outer stakeholders of the current organization.
An existential-phenomenological approach was adopted as a methodological frame.
The existential dimension makes it adequate to figure out a team leader’s personal
experience in their actual work setting. Phenomenology is included because of our
interest in general experiential knowledge among team leaders. The use of empirical
phenomenology allows general meanings or structures of participants’ personal
experiences to be grasped and described (Giorgi, 2009; Perttula, Väänänen, Malinauskas,
Gudliauskaite-Godvade & Godvadas, 2010). The research material was gathered
by open interviews, which is one relevant way to collect empirical data when applying
an existential-phenomenological methodology. The use of an existentialphenomenological
approach and the related empirical methods has been lacking in
previous feedback research.
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