An examination of team reactions to negative performance feedback and their relationship to team performance

Despite the abundant research regarding individual-level feedback, few studiesexamine team feedback, particularly the relationship between team feedback reactions andorganizational performance. Through a field study and a lab study, this paper examines tworeactions to team feedback, specifically blaming and strategizing, and their relationship toteam performance. Study 1 showed that both blaming and strategizing occur in about 1/3 ofteam feedback meetings in an international sample of teams. Blaming was found tonegatively correlate with productivity improvement (r = -.59), whereas strategizing wasfound to positively correlate with productivity improvement (r = .33). Study 2 was a labstudy conducted to addresses several of the limitations from Study 1. The results from Study2 were mixed. Although the manipulation failed to differentiate the experimental conditionsin Study 2, post hoc correlational analyses showed a positive relationship betweenstrategizing and viability, and a negative relationship between excuse making and viability.Correlational analyses also revealed a negative relationship between blaming or excusemaking and team cohesion. These results suggest further research is warranted in this area.