Leadership and social psychology of the self: Managers' reactions to feedback in a training workshop

Three facets of self-motivations are identified as potentially relevant to explaining managers' reactions to social feedback on their leadership performance. These are theories concerning self-esteem, self-consistency, and self-presentation, which bear on affective, cognitive and behavioral responses to feedback from others. Self-esteem refers to the maintenance of one's favorable self-image; self-consistency refers to the congruence of the self-image and social information; self-presentation refers to the symbolic expression of one's own self to others. Reactions to feedback may be influenced by any or all of these facets of self-motivations.; Simulation and field studies have been conducted to explore managers' reactions to social feedback in the context of a leadership training workshop. It was found that the discrepancy between self-image and social feedback triggered more affective and cognitive reactions than it did behavioral reactions. This result implies that motives for self-esteem and self-consistency had more influence on feedback reactions than did self-presentation motives. However, it was not found that the effects of self-esteem and self-consistency were exclusive to the realms of affective and cognitive reactions respectively, as commonly construed by many researchers. Instead, each of these self-motivations had effects on both psychological realms.; Partial correlation analyses also suggested that affective and cognitive reactions mediated the impact of the discrepancy between self-image and social feedback on behavioral reactions.; Furthermore, cluster analyses suggested that feedback recipients had different psychological reactions even though they had similar perceptions of the discrepancy between self-image and social feedback. This finding implies that these reactions were activated by a complex set of self-motivations.; It is possible that reactions to feedback might vary with properties of the manager's role in his or her organization. One of the three studies found that the hierarchical level of feedback sources and the social climate in the organization influenced the reactions of feedback recipients. It also found that the males reacted more cautiously than did the females in relating to the feedback.; This dissertation concludes with a theoretical model of reactions to feedback. In this model, the comparison of self- and peers- evaluations activates self-esteem, self-consistency, and self-presentation, which in turn elicit feedback reactions. The saliency of each of these self-motivations depends on the feedback recipient's personality and social context. The effectiveness of feedback is very much related to the working environment. Moreover, it is suggested that feedback is a powerful device of social control rather than an individualistic mechanism of performance enhancement. The practical implication of this model is that the design of feedback systems requires attention to the recipient's concerns with self-esteem, self-consistency, and self-presentation.