Financial Review BOSS | Magazine > Nothing but the truth

It's a hot tool for telling your boss why he drives you nuts. But 360-degree feedback can be counterproductive. Do companies play with fire when they canvas opinions from the bottom up?

Tony pointed out this article, on the pros and cons of 360 degree feedback.

Once again, I notice the desperate need to categorise and get a nice, simple, binary answer to the question, is this any good. A quest that leads to laughable attempts at an answer like this:

The Watson Wyatt 2001 Human Capital Index – an ongoing study of the link between HR practices and shareholder value at 750 large American companies – found that those with 360-degree programs experienced a 10.6 per cent decrease in shareholder value. In Asia Pacific companies, the impact is virtually neutral – a fall of only 0.3 per cent.

The drift of the article is, essentially, that it depends. On a lot of not-easily classfied variables. Once again, the search for recipe cards to run human systems fails...