CHAPTER 2
Introduction
This chapter will review the related literature conducted on the area of study. By embarking on such pursuit, the research may be guided accordingly by firstly discovering where the research is coming from, what and how much have been studied regarding the topic and what it is yet to tackle. Besides providing background to the study, this chapter will provide the necessary backbone and support in order for the research to stand credible. By surveying the past researches related to the study, a historical perspective may take place. The researcher will also gain an idea on how such venture has been explored in the past. In this manner, this study may be able to reflect, compare itself, learn from setbacks and produce a stronger and more efficient study. This part of the paper will also provide the research a rich source of data, both new and old, that will enhance and enrich the study (and the direction it will plan to undertake) even the more.
The previous discussion introduced the topic. What this chapter should do then is to further enrich the reader of the data regarding the research. It will clarify the research for the researcher and the reader, and in a sense concretize the goals, aims and objectives expressed earlier in the study. The chapter will emphasize how it will contribute to the field of study it has chosen and further improve it. Since, the focus of the research problem is to asses if there is a need for feedback from the ‘part time’ employees in ABC stores, this chapter will provide important details about employee feedback. Further, this will also provide a review of the importance of employee feedback, specifically in retail industry. The discussion will also include information about the different types of employee feedbacks and the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Further, this will also discuss the relevance of employee feedback in Retail sector, the usefulness of having employee feedback to reduce costs, the disadvantages of not having employee feedback system as well as the disadvantages of employee feedback to a retail store.
Employee Feedback
One of the problems faced by different organisations is in terms of having effective and efficient performance among the stakeholders, specifically in line with the employees. It is said that any organisation, may it be profit-oriented or not-for-profit, the most vital asset is its employees. And for these organisations to maximise their assets, they should manage the employees’ working condition with intelligence and efficiency (, 1998). It is therefore necessary to understand the employees for the organisation to be effective (, 1996). Consequently, employees must then be motivated for the survival of the organisation. Motivated employees are more productive. To be effective, organisations need to understand what motivates employees within the context of the roles they perform. Thus, it is important to have a feedback system within the organisation.
Feedback is the information people receive about their performance. It conveys an evaluation about the quality of their performance behaviors. Giving feedback is “the activity of providing information to staff members about their performance on job expectations” (, 1990, p. 20). Feedback is an important part of the education process. Test grades let students know what they have achieved and what they must learn to do better next time. People at work give feedback to reinforce others’ good behavior and correct their poor behavior. The recipient of feedback judges its value and determines whether to accept and act on the feedback, reject it, or ignore it. Feedback has different purposes at different career stages. It helps newcomers learn the ropes, mid-career employees to improve performance and consider opportunities for development, and late career employees to maintain their productivity. Managers are an important source of feedback because they establish performance objectives and provide rewards for attaining those objectives. Other sources of feedback are co-workers, subordinates, and customers.
Feedback does not only come from these sources, sometimes the management are seeking the comments and feedbacks of the employees per se to help them in improving organisational performance. Employee feedback is the process of delivering feedback from employees to the management intended to identify ways to enhance management effectiveness or to increase organisational performance. It is also a process of giving information to the management about the current status of the organisation as perceived by employees. The information given by the employees may include but not limited to their opinions about the organisation and about their needs and demands to be motivated to do their job efficiently.
Importance of Employee Feedback
It is said that employees are considered as one of the most important assets of an organisation. Therefore, employers cannot be inflexible about implementing rules and regulations without taking into considerations the perceptions and opinions of the employees. Herein, an effective policy can be implemented by using proper communication channels. Communication between the management and employees can be attained through a well-oiled feedback process. Hence, employee feedback is about getting information from employees and using these data to benefit the organisation.
Accordingly, feedback is a process of mutual communication and reciprocation between the management and the human resources. It describes the pulse of the organisation. In business sectors, employee feedback is considered as a scientific process. It is done in different levels of the company before implementing a new organisational policy or announcing promotions. Further, many consider employee feedback as a diagnosis of an organisation. In this regard, the entire process of feedback includes the design, analysis, implement and chalking out of action plans which are handled in scientific manner.
Few companies are trying to design their own feedback process while others opted to conduct surveys by using different employee feedback tools available and by considering the help of HR consulting firms. Organisations are using employee feedback because of the benefits that they get from knowing the views of their employees. Firms considered employee feedback as an aspect of management system which yields much importance.
One of the importance’s of having employee feedback is it enables the company to capture various kinds of information from their employees. This information can be categorised into two factors: company level and the job level. At a company level, the information gathered may include the awareness about the organisation’s financial status, the global strategy used by the company, the overall perception of employees about the company environment and other important information in the internal environment of the organisation. On the other hand, information from job level may include details about the variety of work, quality of work and role play. The information gathered may be used for evaluation purposes and for identifying different issues to be addressed (, 200).
It is noted that when employees pass through the company doors, these employees do not leave their opinions behind. The opinions of employee also affect attitude and performance. Hence, employers need to understand every aspects of their company in order to be more competitive. Developing employee feedback not only provides the management with a way to constructively voice their opinions, but it can also provide employers a heads up on different problems they didn’t know existed and with that, they can develop solutions before these issues become a deeper conflicts.
Other importance of having employee feedback is it enables the management to know the needs and demands of their employees for them to be motivated to work efficiently for the company. Through this information, the management may be able to find a way in meeting these needs to satisfy their employees (, 1994). Satisfying the employees can significantly create a good working relationship among management and the employee and a good reason for the employees to do their best to achieve organisational goal. It involves responsibility and authority for decisions affecting the workplace, downwards through the organisation.
It cannot be denied that one of the most important factors for an organisation to be successful is to have a harmonious relationship between the management and the employees. It is essential that the employee feedback system provided by the organisation is clear and consistent from within all levels of the organisation. It must address both organisational and individual employee concerns.
Types of Employee Feedback
There are different types of employee feedback. These include employee survey feedback and 360-degree feedbacks.
Employee Survey Feedback
Another formal method of providing feedback involves the employee attitude survey. This process reports attitude survey results to managers and employees (, 1988). It is called “survey feedback” when accompanied by a structured follow-through procedure to help work groups interpret and use the information (, 1977). Employee attitude surveys may be collected via paper-and-pencil questionnaire, one-on-one interviews, or interviews with groups of employees (termed “focus groups”).
This is different from multi-source surveys such as upward and multi-source feedback because the survey items ask for general attitudes about different facets of the company, possibly including the supervisor. However, instead of averaging the results separately for each unit manager and giving the manager an individualized feedback report, a single report is generated for the entire department or even the entire company. Therefore, managers must evaluate the extent to which the overall results apply to them and their work groups (, 2003).
Employee attitude surveys are less costly than analyzing and preparing reports for each manager separately, although the results are necessarily less precise. Nevertheless, survey feedback results can provide a useful way to stimulate discussion in the work group about issues that may be relevant to other parts of the company as well. Results may be reported to everyone in the organization or department in special bulletins. Supervisors should be encouraged to meet with their work groups to discuss the meaning of the results for the organization as a whole and the work group in particular.
The overall corporate survey results become a tracking mechanism to evaluate the effects of organizational policies on employee satisfaction. Also, the importance of the satisfaction measures can be determined by examining the correlations between employee satisfaction and outcome measures such as employee turnover and absenteeism.
360-Degree Feedback
360-Degree Feedback also known as multi-source feedback refers to ratings that can come from subordinates, peers, supervisors, internal customers, external customers, or others. When feedback comes from all the locations around a person (boss, subordinates, suppliers, customers) it is also called “360-degree” feedback. Usually, multi-source feedback is collected for managers or supervisors, but it could be collected for any employee, with the raters depending on the employee’s role in the organization. Multi-source ratings are not always collected from all possible sources. For instance, sometimes only upward ratings are collected (i.e., subordinates are asked to rate their supervisor). Multi-source ratings are collected through surveys using computer, telephone, in-person interviews, or paper-and-pencil questionnaires. The survey may be administered annually or more often. For example, a division of Motorola collects ratings quarterly by computer for automatic averaging of scores and providing of feedback reports to managers (, 1995).
Multisource feedback is growing in popularity and importance as a method for evaluating employees and providing them with input for development. A 1995 report indicated that all Fortune 500 companies used or were planning to use multisource feedback (, 1995). A 1996 paper reported that 25% of companies use some form of upward or multisource feedback survey process (, 1996). Four years later, another report indicated that as many as 12% to 29% of all U. S. organizations were using this method (, 2000). Clearly, the use of multisource feedback has not diminished, and in all likihood has increased.
There are several reasons why multi-source feedback is such a popular method for evaluating performance. The feedback contributes to individual development by providing information on worthwhile directions for learning and growth. It builds self-awareness, which in turn increases self-reflection and perhaps a greater understanding of others and how they react to you. This, in turn, could prompt managers to think more about the potential consequences of their actions toward others. Managers may feel accountable to respond to others’ ratings of them. When administered over time, the survey results provide a way for managers to track changes in their own performance as they try to react to previous feedback and change their behavior.
Likewise, , (1998) stated that the 360-degree feedback process encompasses the creation and execution of employee development plans. The experts have seen 360-degree feedback used in a number of ways, including (1) to achieve business strategy and culture change by clarifying the behaviors that are required to support these initiatives by “re-focusing the workforce to attain changed organisational goals through changing their behavior” (, 1997, p. 19); (2) to enhance team effectiveness by identifying gaps in team skills sets in organisations seeking to implement a team structure ; and (3) as part of human resource management systems. “Just as individuals use 360 degree feedback to determine their own development needs, organisations can use aggregate reports to create a profile of training and development needs across the company” (, 1997, p. 20).
On the other hand, feedback provides a way to assess goal accomplishment. A key to employees’ perceptions of their goal-performance discrepancies is the self/co-worker performance rating discrepancy. , (1991) and , (1993) have investigated how people react when feedback is more, less, or equal to self-perceptions. Basically the 360-feedback suggests the need to consider what happens when different self/other discrepancies arise from different sources. Suppose employees whose self-evaluations are unfavorable receive unfavorable feedback from customers but not co-workers. , (1976) believes that such employees may be satisfied with feedback that is consistent with their self-perceptions and cause them to pay more attention to the source(s) that match their self-perceptions.
Others may give more weight to the least favorable source, according to the prospect theory of , (1979) notion that losses loom larger than gains. Recipients of feedback have more positive reactions and report higher ability levels when they focus on positive features of the feedback (e.g., the number of others who performed worse than they did) rather than the negative features (e.g., the number of others who performed better than they did) (, 1994).
Relevance of Employee Feedback in Retail Store
Principally, many believed that no one really know the methods, system and procedures of an organisation better than the employees. It is said that employees are the company and the management can’t possibly provide the needs of the employees without getting their feedback. Employee feedback is also called job satisfaction surveys, organization climate surveys and employee opinion surveys,
As the management seeks feedback and if they give attention to the views of the employees, it leaves as a strong message to the employees that they are important to the organisation. The concept of retailing is simply defined as the direct sale of commodities to consumers. However, to be able to succeed in this kind of venture, a considerable number of considerations must be identified. The tool that one uses to measure its success often defines the vision and strategy in retailing ( 1997). One of these is to initiate a system that would motivate the employees to do their job in a quality manner, specifically in a direct contact with the customers.
Millions of people are employed in retailing industry. These employees are coping with many of the same environment and work-related situation as factory and office workers who have been so intensively studies by behavioral researchers. Like other forms of employment, retailing work is consists of job dimensions. And since labor is one of the retailer’s greatest costs, there is a need to strategically manage the personnel for high levels of productivity and return on investment.
An effective retails store management is dependent on motivated, satisfied and loyal employees who will be productive, develop tenure with the firm and maintain assigned work schedules. In order to attract and keep their employees satisfied, the retail store managers must consider the views and opinions of the employees. The employees may not be satisfied if the management do not provide the needs of their employees and to know the needs, there is a need for an employee feedback system.
Through this employee feedback, the management may be able to know the views and perceptions of their employees regarding the issue of satisfying the customers. In addition, the management of a retail store may be able to improve quality, productivity and customer service. In addition, employee feedback is also relevant for retail stores in a way that it helps the management to know what going on right away with the store and what might be going wrong. Further, the retail store management may also find the opportunities to save money and ways to increase the bottom line. Successful retail industries gather feedback and use it to their advantage.
Usefulness of Having Employee Feedback
Employee feedback can be said to be a useful tool in enhancing organisation performance. Through employee feedback system, the management are being aware of the needs of their employees. When individual needs such as growth and strength, coupled with job characteristics or job scope, have a matching existence within a structure then the levels of job performance and satisfaction are expected to be high. Upward and lateral communication through an effective employee feedback system has significant effect on job performance and job satisfaction when the matching existence with strategic management is present (, 1985)
Satisfying the employees through employee feedback can significantly create a good working relationship among employer and the employee and a good reason for the employees to do their best to achieve organisational goal. It involves responsibility and authority for decisions affecting the workplace, downwards through the organisation. Thus, in an organisation, employees need to be equally empowered by knowing their views and opinions which can be achieved by an employee feedback system. This empowerment results to an increased competence, self-esteem and self-respect, which are very important to one’s well-being.
In addition, employee feedback is also useful in terms of creating an environment in the workplace that results in employees feeling better about themselves when they are in it results in love of their work. A working environment that constantly raises an employee’s self-esteem, above that she/he experiences anywhere else in their life, will be where she/he most desires to spend their time and yields very high employee satisfaction with their job and costs next to nothing. People do more of what they enjoy and less of what they don’t enjoy. The results also show that people who enjoy working are more productive. Furthermore, analysis shows that in an organisation, there is an existing problem that the employees are facing due to their individualities. Since, they have different personalities and values, they may tend to have difficulty in communicating with other employees, thus result in some conflicts.
Another use of employee feedback is in line with cost reduction. Through employee feedback, the organisation will be able have the assurance of having competent employees; hence, this may mean that the company may reduce the cost for hiring purposes since the employees that they have are efficient enough to handle the tasks given because they are satisfied. Furthermore, through employee feedback, the company may reduce cost on outsourcing other employees from other departments to do the job for them. Through the willingness of the employees to work hard for the company the organisation may yield higher profit because this means that they provide quality service among their customers.
Disadvantages of not having Employee Feedback
Any organisation, may it be profit oriented or not-for-profit, the most vital asset is its employees. In addition, for these organisations to maximize their assets, human resource management (HRM) should manage the employees’ working condition with intelligence and efficiency (, 1998). The employees must be allowed to be involved in making work-related decisions to further enhance the organisational structure (, 1996). Furthermore, the structure of tasks among the employees strengthens the organisational performance (, 1989).
It is therefore necessary to understand the employees to build a good relationship on them (, 1983). The development, building, motivation, enhancement, and enrichment of the employees of any organisation largely depend on the leadership, mandate, and vision of the human resource management (HRM) of an organisation (, 1999). According to (2002), the process of making an organisation is simultaneously the growth and maintenance of relationships among individuals who are working towards a common goal and the actual accomplishment of tasks, individually and collectively.
However, if an organisation does not give value to the views of their employees, the employee may not be able to do what is expected of them to do. Without considering an employee feedback system that will monitor the employees about their needs, expectations and views, the organisation may be affected negatively. The employees may not do their job well because they might think that the organisation is not giving importance to them. Logically, it is not plausible to satisfy customers with unsatisfied employees.
Most importantly, studies shows that satisfied employees are just likely to leave an organisation as unsatisfied employees. Thus, if the organisation will not be able to impose an employee feedback, they miss the chance of knowing what their employees is thinking and the needs of the employees to make them be satisfied.
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Disadvantages of not having Employee Feedback in Retail Store
In managing people, an the management of a retail store, should be able to learn to think more systematically and strategically in using the organisation’s most valuable asset and the company’s great resource and that is the people. The retail management should be able to develop a thriving organisational culture and a stronger organisation by good management of the people, providing their needs and the things that they deserve in order for them to be motivated and satisfied and for them to seek more improvement and career development for their sake and for the organisation’s sake as well ( 1999). And this can only be done by knowing what is in the mind of the employees.
As mentioned, employee feedback helps retail management to ensure satisfied customers because of direct contacts with satisfied employees. In this regard, employee feedbacks system is important. Without an employee feedback, a retail industry may not be able to determine the problems ahead of time which may result to a deeper conflict. Furthermore, if a retail industry does not have an employee feedback system, they will not be able to know their needs which may affect their performance, especially in dealing with customers.
Employee feedback has emerged as a strategy used to learn more about employees’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. It works on the fundamental tenet that the employees are at the heart business success. In general, the firm needs to value its employees by using employee feedback based on the total value of their relationship with the company, the potential value of their relationship, the profitability of their relationship, the insights they can provide the company, and the influence that they wield over other employees. But without having employee feedback system, a retail industry must not be able to know all this information which may affect business performance.
In addition, another disadvantage of not having employee feedback system in a retail store is in terms of not gaining clearer insights and more intimate understanding of employees’ behaviors. Herein, the retail industry may not be able to build an effective competitive advantage with their unsatisfied employees.
Reference
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