Stories
Stories
Research Brief: May I Ask Your Advice?
Ashley Whillans (photo by Evgenia Eliseeva)
Workplace feedback can range from helpful to harmful, says Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans, but far too often it falls somewhere in the milque-toasty middle. The reason? We are asking the wrong question. Research by Whillans and three HBS doctoral students—Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, and Ariella Kristal—found that people who go seeking advice receive information that’s far more useful than those who request feedback.
The researchers conducted studies with more than a thousand participants, including online lab studies and a field experiment, all of which confirmed that asking for feedback produces more vague and limited responses, while asking for advice results in forward-thinking and actionable input. The difference boils down to mindset: judging past performance versus imagining future potential.
Whillans explains that our exposure to feedback most often occurs in a setting like a performance evaluation, where someone either has or has not passed a measurable threshold. As a result, we limit ourselves to examining what went right or wrong. When providing advice, on the other hand, it’s as if we develop a curiosity about the person’s potential. “We start thinking about how we can help this person grow into the employee that we believe they can be,” she says.
Whillans and her fellow researchers are looking into whether these findings could also help explain the gap in critical feedback that women typically receive relative to their male peers, as well as the withholding bias that minorities experience in the workplace. In those dynamics, people refrain from sharing the information that could be most useful in helping a person improve and succeed in their career. “It’s an implicit effort to not seem negative, but reserving that input has performance consequences later on,” Whillans says. “A better understanding of how advice-seeking closes those gaps would be a really powerful effect of this work.”
For more on the research, see their HBS working paper, “Framing Feedback Giving as Advice Giving Yields More Critical and Actionable Input.”
Post a Comment
Featured Faculty
Related Stories
-
- 18 Jan 2024
- TechCrunch
Match Game
Re: Faye Iosotaluno (MBA 2008) -
- 01 Dec 2023
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
Endless Possibilities
Re: Faye Iosotaluno (MBA 2008); By: Julia Hanna -
- 01 Dec 2023
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
The Imposter Among Us
Re: Edgar Wallner (PMD 22); Dick Egan (PMD 22); Mika Nishimura (MBA 1989); Clifford Maxwell (MBA 2021); Sumit Ganguli (OPM 52); Ellie Luce (PMD 30); Mike Voevodsky (MBA 1992); Sam Burman (MBA 1993); Francis Nedvidek (TGMP 4); Wendy Perben (MBA 2002); Hugh Taylor (MBA 1992); Greg Brown (MBA 1992); John Dixon (MBA 1982) -
- 07 Nov 2023
- Skydeck
Love and Money
Re: Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993)