How Can Leaders Develop Organizational Resilience through Feedback?
- William Lindstrom
- Aug 11
- 23 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Topic: Organizational Resilience, Leadership Performance, Feedback Systems, Workforce Alignment
Audience: C-Suite, Managing Partners/Directors, Leaders & Owners in Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Family-Owned Businesses
Author: William Lindstrom, CEO, The Culture Think Tank
Summary: In high-pressure investment and founder-led environments, the ability to adapt and perform under changing market, economic, and competitive conditions is essential.
Organizational resilience - the capacity to pivot quickly and emerge stronger from disruption - is not a fixed trait, but a skill leaders can actively develop. Drawing from feedback theory and resilience research, William Lindstrom reflects on how structured, reciprocal, and well-timed feedback loops can bridge the gap between leadership and workforce insights. The result is improved trust, faster learning cycles, and greater agility in execution.
This paper offers a practical framework for designing feedback systems that align leader actions with frontline realities, enabling organizations to navigate uncertainty while protecting performance, valuation, and long-term growth.
Part I: Research Questions and Reflections
Research Question
Leaders consistently face market, economic, technical, and political uncertainties. These uncertainties directly impact their workforces’ and organizations’ performance. A leader’s ability to successfully navigate their organization through turbulent times is essential for sustaining growth and long-term success.
Although critical, many leaders and organizations lack the insights, processes, and tools needed to adjust and align the efforts of their workforces when suddenly faced with a new challenge or external threat. This paper aims to investigate the actions leaders can take to proactively prepare their organizations and workforces for unknown and unexpected challenges by investing the following research question: How can leaders develop organizational resilience through feedback?
Personal and Professional Relevance
I have spent most of my professional career supporting or leading operational turnaround efforts, which is different than financial turnaround. Most people have some familiarity with financial turnaround because these efforts are often related to bankruptcy. In financial turnaround, advisors are primarily working with investors, banks, and other debt holders to adjust interest rates and other financial terms to provide organizations financial flexibility needed to continue operations and pay bills. Operational turnaround is different in that advisors are primarily working with leaders and employees to identify operational areas of improvement needed to drive efficiencies, sales growth, and profitability.
In operational turnaround, the first thing I was taught was the role of the advisor is to listen to the workforce because the workforce almost always has the insights leaders need to drive efficiencies, sales growth, and profitability.
The irony in operational turnaround is the operational turnaround advisors are hired by leaders to listen to the leaders’ workforces because the leaders cannot or are struggling too successfully. The disconnect between leader and workforce is a significant risk because it increases the risk of external threats impacting operations. When leaders lack operational insights, they are unable to adjust and align workforce efforts when faced with an unexpected challenge.
The irony of my role, as an operational turnaround advisor, led me to wonder why leaders struggle to gather the critical insights needed to optimize efforts and adapt to change. As I progressed through my career, I came to believe that the disconnect between leader and workforce is related to scope and scale. Within any sized organization, large or small, things move quickly, and there are many more people than there are leaders. This makes it difficult for leaders to connect and stay abreast of all the tangibles and intangibles facing their workforces. To overcome this issue, leaders need a simple, pragmatic, and consistently effective means to stay connected with their workforce and gain access to the insights they need to address unexpected challenges. The need for a simple and pragmatic approach for improving connectivity between leader and workforce led to my research question, “How can leaders develop organizational resilience through feedback?”
Justification for Research Question
My research question, “How can leaders develop organizational resilience through feedback?”, is well-designed and scoped to explore practical and proactive ways leaders can develop resilience within their organizations. The goal is to improve the connection between leader and workforce necessary to gain access to the insights leaders need to address unexpected challenges. The question is “right-sized” because it does not attempt to solve the problem and is limited to understanding how feedback can be used as a tool for leaders to improve operational resilience within their organizations. The scope of research related to employee, teacher, and student feedback is well researched and provides a strong theoretical body of work to draw upon.
There also exists a strong theoretical body of work related to resilience within the workplace. However, there is a lack of research that frames feedback as a practical and effective leadership tool that leaders can use to proactively develop organizational resilience. It is the aim of this paper to build upon the existing body of work in feedback theory and resilience theory to demonstrate the potential use of feedback as a leadership tool for developing organizational resilience.
Although intended to address the needs within for-profit companies, I believe the findings from my research question will apply across any type of leader leader-led organization that includes education, not-for-profit, healthcare, and charitable organizations.
Literature Synthesis
The literature synthesis examines current research studies, case studies, articles, and proposals within the areas of feedback theory and resilience theory. The literature synthesis looks to demonstrate the importance of resilience within organizations and the potential benefits and limitations the role of feedback plays in developing high-performing leaders and teams capable of adjusting to and overcoming unexpected challenges.
What Resilience Is
A common theme across the readings is the definition of organizational resilience, which is broadly defined as an organization’s ability to align and adapt to external challenges. Although framed in the context of overcoming challenges, the interpretation of resilience is not limited to simply surviving or enduring but instead emphasizes thriving through challenges (Grant & Sandberg, 2017, Ghezzi & Sanasi, 2024, and Kirkman et al., 2021).
Situated within a frame focused on thriving, organizational resilience is not an innate characteristic or personality type. Organizational resilience is a skill. It requires deliberate action, the mindset of redesign, and the agency necessary for the organizations to change during challenging times and emerge stronger for it.
Grant and Sandberg (2021) build upon the concept that organizational resilience is a skill that requires deliberate action to develop. They describe resilience as “the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.” Kirkman et al. (2021) delve deeper into the concept of resilience and define resilience from the perspective of both the individual and the organization. Although the aspects and significance of resilience vary between individuals and organizations, the core theme remains the same. Resilience is a skill that enables individuals and organizations to adapt, adjust, and thrive in response to external challenges (Kirkman et al., 2021).
Why Resilience Is Strategically Critical
When facing significant market, economic, and political disruptions, organizations may need to pivot to remain economically viable. A pivot involves a deliberate shift in strategy or structure, such as adjusting a product offering, entering a new market, or redesigning operations (Ghezzi & Sanasi, 2024).
In a study that analyzed the sudden and drastic changes twenty-four Italian companies made to their products, services, and structure in response to COVID, Ghezzi and Sanasi (2024) argue that leaders can no longer treat pivoting as a desperate and rare act of survival. Organizations must proactively prepare and treat pivoting as an essential and necessary strategic tool to overcome challenges and adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
Framed within the context of a Pivot, organizational resilience is an essential skill leaders need to develop within their organizations to execute a strategic change. Without the ability to rapidly adjust to external challenges, organizations will lack the strategic ability to pivot and thrive through unexpected challenges (Ghezzi & Sanasi, 2024).
The Problem with Improvisation - Standardization
Organizational resilience is a skill that enables organizations to adapt and adjust to external challenges and requires leaders to impart agency upon its workforce (Kirkman et al., 2021). The challenge organizational resilience provides leaders is the agency required to build organizational resilience does not align with traditional business practices that value standardization (Antonoaie et al., 2021).
Bhamra et al. (2020) demonstrate the dissonance between standardization and resilience through their “Resilience Configurations Matrix.” Within the matrix, the authors compare the organizational structures of organization based upon the perceived level of resilience readiness. The least resilient-ready organizations are categorized as having “rigid” structure as compared to the most resilient-ready organizations which are categorized as having “agile” structures. The desire for standardized and optimized business practices conflicts with an organization’s ability to develop organizational resilience (Bhamra et al., 2020).
Antonoaie et al. (2020) further examines the conflict between resilience and standardization through the example of improvisation. Improvisation requires relational practices that encourage continual adjustments and the acceptance of shifting perceptions, roles, and frameworks (Carter-Stone et al., 2023). The agency to shift and adjust roles and frameworks necessary to develop organizational resilience does not easily support the standardization of processes and increases the need and reporting complexity to track and measure resilience across an organization (Lee et al., 2013).
Feedback as a Practice for Developing Organizational Resilience
Scott Dorsey, the former CEO of Exact Target, is credited for building a robust and vibrant organization that was renowned for its ability to quickly adapt and adjust to changing market conditions (Kruse, 2021). Dorsey’s use of a “Friday Note” is credited for his ability to build and sustain a resilient organization. Each Friday for three consecutive years, without missing one Friday, Dorsey shared a company-wide update. The update provided the workforce with summarized feedback of the week’s accomplishments and proactively requested suggestions from the workforce (Kruse, 2021).
The “Friday Note” provided consistent sharing of feedback that created a feedback-seeking culture, which is shown to directly impacted employee task performance (Dobrosielska & Evans, 2021). In their study that analyzes the impact of feedback on workplace performance, Dobrosielska & Evans (2021) demonstrate that the simple act of providing feedback, regardless of whether individuals request feedback, is statistically shown to improve self-reported task performance. Within the context of organizational resilience, feedback provides leaders a means to practically and proactively develop resilience within their organizations.
Content Still Matters
The act of providing feedback is shown to improve self-reported task performance (Dobrosielska & Evans, 2021). However, the type of feedback is shown to play a significant role in how feedback is received and how the feedback benefits task performance (Jepsen et al., 2021). Jepsen et al. (2021) demonstrate that negative feedback is limited in its ability to improve and sustain performance because it triggers a sense of shame. A sense of shame is shown to improve performance for a short duration of time among employees who are both goal-oriented and have high self-esteem. For the remainder of employees, shame is demonstrated to negatively impact performance (Jepsen et al., 2021).
Existing literature supports the findings that negative feedback impairs performance. Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those directly impacted” is an example. To build organizational resilience through feedback, the feedback provided to the workforce needs to be attuned to the needs of the employees that face and are expected to overcome the external challenges impacting the organization. The feedback also needs to be reciprocal and provide the workforce the opportunity to share ideas back to an organization’s leadership. Building organizational resilience through feedback requires both active sharing and active listening for leaders to foster the trust and connection within a workforce (Costanza-Chock, 2020, Nachmanovitch, 2019).
In addition to the type of content provided through feedback, the complexity and degree of ownership associated with the shared feedback is shown to play a role in task performance (Wang & Zhang, 2022). In their study on performance reviews, Wang and Zhang (2022) demonstrate that feedback and the associated expectations associated with the feedback should be scaffolded to initially focus on setting the vision for the future of the organization before adjusting the focus to the assignment of expectations and goals.
Leveraging feedback to promote organizational resilience requires leaders to remain attuned to the core Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those directly impacted” and expanding the concept of feedback and content to include feedback generated from within the workforce through active listening (Costanza-Chock, 2020, Nachmanovitch, 2019). Designing feedback that builds organizational resilience requires content is that is centered on the needs of the workforce.
Frequency Matters
The final consideration found within the literature relates to frequency and how the frequency of feedback impacts performance. Upon review, the findings indicate that feedback frequency does play a critical role in determining performance and the greater the frequency the greater the degree of impact (Beenen et al., 2020, Waddoups, 2022).
Beenen et al. (2020) conducted a review of 51 studies of performance reviews. Across the 51 samples, it was shown that the frequency of feedback was directly related to increased performance and workplace satisfaction. However, the results of the review highlighted that the correlation between performance and workplace satisfaction was impacted by moderating factors that included the type of feedback, who provided the feedback, and the strengths of the personal relationship within the organization. The general takeaway is feedback frequency is important, but the impact of the feedback was moderated by the people and workplace environment (Beenen et al., 2020).
Waddoups (2022) expands upon the importance of feedback frequency and provides context that helps explain why feedback frequency matters beyond the act of communicating. By introducing the concept of Feedback-Driven Time Segmenting (FDTS), Waddoups demonstrates that frequent feedback triggers more regular self-reflection, accelerating learning cycles and behavioral adjustments, especially in high-challenge or low-clarity environments. This insight frames the benefit of feedback as more than providing information, but also as a cognitive tool that structures time and drives performance.
Looking Forward
Preliminary Inquiry
Although the literature synthesis supports the potential use of feedback as a leadership tool for developing organizational resilience, structured case studies are lacking that demonstrate the utilization of feedback is shown to improve organizational resilience in practice. To begin to build a foundation of structured cases, the following proposes a study design for the Private Equity industry aimed at demonstrating how both the sharing and collecting of feedback is necessary to design effective feedback loops that foster the development of organizational resilience.
Private Equity (PE) Funds invest in companies on behalf of their investors. PE Funds primary role is identifying, acquiring, and supporting the companies they purchase. Once purchased, the acquired companies become active members of the PE Fund’s Portfolio and are referred to as Portfolio Companies or Portcos. Portco leaders and their workforces are pushed to perform and deliver investor returns. This environment is extremely challenging; and like many venture-funded companies, a portco’s success is often predicated on the leaders’ ability to adapt and adjust to market challenges and pivot when facing severe competitive pressures. PE Funds and their network of portcos provide access to a network of comparable companies, leaders, and workforces to engage and determine how feedback can be used by leaders to build resilience within organizations.
Following Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those who are directly impacted,” any engagement needs to include all stakeholders within the community and include employees, leaders, fund managers, and investors. Within the PE industry, it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing on only leaders. Engaging all stakeholders within the PE Fund and portco community ensures the use of feedback and impact on resilience is grounded within the whole of the community.
Engaging with Target Community
A combination of open-ended survey questions and listening sessions that include all members of the community could serve to establish a baseline understanding of the type of feedback and the communication channels that best align to the needs of all stakeholders. Holding true to Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those who are directly impacted,” the needs of each stakeholder should be clearly defined and included within the feedback design process. In addition to the process of sharing feedback, the process of collecting feedback should be considered when developing open-ended survey questions and conducting listening sessions. The inclusion of both the sharing and collecting of feedback is necessary to design effective feedback loops and to demonstrate how feedback loops are necessary to fostering the development of organizational resilience.
Operational Considerations
In addition to considering the needs and inputs of all stakeholders, the design of open-ended survey questions and listening sessions need to focus on providing a safe-sharing environment that supports the adherence of confidentiality and anonymity. In addition to confidentiality and anonymity, the analytics design that includes AI to analyze findings and to predict leadership actions, using a best-fit model, needs to take into consideration and utilize data grounding techniques to ensure the collected data is securely contained and properly reflects the findings and insights from the PE Fund and portco community.
Finally, in consideration of Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those who are directly impacted,” the results of the collected survey and listening sessions should be summarized and shared, ensuring all stakeholders are recognized for their contributions and are respected as contributing participants.
Identifying Ethical Considerations
The ethical considerations are largely limited to anonymity, confidentiality, and the grounding of data when using AI, as outlined in the above section. PE Funds, portcos, and investors are highly regulated and have established term sheets, non-disclosure agreements, and other related legal protections in place.
However, to continue to align to Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those who are directly impacted,” considerations for how the results are used is recommended. Prior to releasing results, it is important to evaluate how the findings impact employee stock options and owner earn-outs, which are typically performance based. Considerations should be taken to ensure shared feedback and existing performance expectations are aligned and stakeholders are not negatively impacted and “lose rights” to equity positions as a result of engagement outcomes.
Implementation
The implementation of an engagement to better understand how feedback can be used to build organizational resilience should align to the findings presented by Wang and Zhang (2022) that demonstrate the collection of simple forms of feedback should be conducted first and used to set and reinforce the vision and direction of the organization. Once the initial findings are established, a second round of survey questions and listening sessions should be conducted that seek to connect and use feedback to assign duties and responsibilities.
This approach also aligns to Costanza-Chock’s (2020) Design Justice principle of “centering the voices of those who are directly impacted” by ensuring active listening occurs between each phase of the engagement and all stakeholders are heard and feel engaged within the effort to determine how feedback can be used as a leadership tool to build organizational resilience.
Part II: Annotated Bibliography
The following provides the list of references used in preparing the support of the research question and an annotated bibliography for each selected reference. The aim of the annotations is to highlight the insights and findings most relevant to the design question. The references and accompanying annotations are as follows:
01. Antonoaie, C., Codreanu, A., & Vasilescu, C. (2021). Resilience: A multi-level approach and its relevance for the development of organizations focused resilience frameworks. Journal of Defense Resources Management, 12(2), 5–22.
This paper presents a multi-level systems-based framework for defining and operationalizing organizational resilience. The paper argues that the generalized process standards for measuring and monitoring resilience defined within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), ISO 22316, and the British Standards Institution (BSI), BS 65000, are insufficient. The authors argue that resilience must be approached at multiple levels that include socio-economic, individual, and organizational for organizations to develop processes to handle complex crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Based on systems theory, the paper outlines how feedback loops between environmental inputs, internal processes, and outcomes affect an organization’s capacity to adapt, absorb, and adjust in the face of significant external disruptions. The importance of shared values, leadership alignment, trust-based cultures, and anticipatory feedback mechanisms are discussed as critical components to developing organizational resilience. The authors also review the importance of improvisation and creative thinking as critical skills in times of stress.
Ultimately, the authors build upon the concept that resilience is a mindset of “bouncing forward” rather than just recovery. “Bouncing forward” algins to the mindset of continual “redesign.” Organizations must learn and redesign after facing each external disruption. This paper provides insights into how process-based feedback can be used to develop leadership practices that develop resilience at both the individual and organizational levels and draws connection to the importance of improvisation and deep authentic listening.
02. Beenen, G., Pichler, S., & Wood, S. (2020). Feedback frequency and appraisal reactions: A meta analytic test of moderators. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(17), 2238–2263. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2018.1443961
This meta-analysis examines the relationship between feedback frequency and employees’ appraisal reactions, such as perceived fairness, satisfaction, motivation, and accuracy of performance evaluations. This meta-analysis included data collected from 51 independent samples. Through their analysis, the authors demonstrate that higher feedback frequency is generally associated with more positive employee reactions. However, the authors stress that there are several moderators that might impact employee reaction. These moderators include the credibility of the feedback, the delivery style, and the strength of the personal relationships. When summarizing the limitations of the study, the authors highlight that the type of content variables included in their analysis was limited to the scope of variables found within the 51 independent performance evaluations. Although the study is limited in demonstrating how the type of content included within the feedback impacts employee reactions, the study does demonstrate the importance of taking feedback frequency into consideration when designing feedback mechanism and feedback loops.
03. Bhamra, R., Burnard, K., & Tsinopoulos, C. (2018). Building Organizational Resilience: Four Configurations. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 65(3), 351–362. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2018.2796181
This empirical study presents a framework for better understanding how organizations build resilience in the face of disruption. Utilizing case studies of three U.K.-based energy-sector organizations, the authors identify two critical dimensions that determine an organization’s ability to effectively respond to a crisis. They are preparation and adaptation. The study used the findings from the case studies to develop a “Resilience Configurations Matrix”. This matrix is presented as a two-by-two table and includes four types of organizational configurations: “At High Risk” (reactive and rigid), “Process-Based” (proactive but inflexible), “Resourceful” (adaptive but unplanned), and “Resilience-Focused” (both proactive and agile). These configurations help explain variation in how organizations identify, evaluate, and prioritize responses to disruptions.
Within the discussion of limitations, the authors are clear to note that they are not stating which of the configurations are optimal because of a lack of empirical support. However, the authors do reinforce the concept that feedback mechanisms and feedback loops play a central role in developing situational awareness and flexibility needed to achieve a “Resilience-Focused” configuration. The authors do discuss how improvisation is a critical skill in developing managers with situational awareness and resource flexible mindsets. This paper provides insights into the critical characteristics of a “Resilience-Focused” organization and feedback plays a role in developing resilience within organizations.
04. Carter-Stone, L., Leander, K., & Supica, E. (2023). “We got so much better at reading each other’s energy”: Knowing, acting, and attuning as an improv ensemble. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 32(2), 250–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2022.2154157
This ethnographic study examines how members of an improvisational theater ensemble develop shared ways of knowing, acting, and attuning to one another in dynamic, high-interdependence settings. Through observational and interview data, the authors identify a set of relational practices that enable the group to function cohesively and adapt in real time. These practices included related embodied listening, emotional attunement, and spontaneous feedback. The relevant point of the article emphasizes the point that resilience is a skill that can be developed and provides the means for employees within a workforce to quickly come together, adapt, share, and align. These are essential behaviors needed to build resilience within organization. Resilience relies on flexibility and adaptability relies on improvisation. This study suggests that resilience can be cultivated through cultures of attunement, not just formal systems.
05. Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001
In the fifth chapter of the book, the author reviews ten design principles that should be considered when designing process, products, and content. The principle that is most relevant when considering how feedback impacts resilience within organizations is Principle 02, “We Center the Voices of Those Who Are Directly Impacted by the Outcomes of the Design Process.” Feedback is both an active effort to share and an active effort to listen. In the context of an organization, Principle 02 emphasizes the need to engage with, listen to, and respond to the employees and stakeholders within the organization. As a result, the application of principle 02 needs to be considered by leaders in the design of feedback mechanisms and feedback loops designed to support building resilience within organizations.
06. Dobrosielska, A., & Evans, T. R. (2021). Feedback-seeking culture moderates the relationship between positive feedback and task performance. Current Psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.), 40(7), 3401–3408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00248-3
This study investigates the connection between managerial positive feedback, feedback-seeking cultures, and employee task performance. The gathered survey data from 289 employed adults in the U.K. The results of the study demonstrated that positive feedback from managers significantly predicts self-rated task performance. The key finding is that self-reported task performance increases regardless of whether the organization is a feedback-seeking organization. This means that providing feedback to employees that do not actively seek feedback improves performance. The authors did find a moderating factor that related to perception. When employees perceive their workplace to be highly supportive of feedback-seeking behaviors, the impact of positive feedback on performance was amplified. The relevance of this study relates to the findings that the simple act of providing positive feedback improves reported task performance. The second point of relevance is the active promotion of feedback-seeking behaviors by leaders in organizations amplifies the benefit of feedback and provides a greater return in terms of task performance.
07. Ghezzi, A., & Sanasi, S. (2024). Pivots as strategic responses to crises: Evidence from Italian companies navigating Covid-19. Strategic Organization, 22(3), 495–529.
This empirical study investigates how Italian companies enacted strategic pivots in response to the COVID-19 crisis, offering a grounded exploration of resilience-building in real time. The study included 24 firms across various industries. The authors identify four distinct pivot patterns. These patterns included: business model innovation, resource reconfiguration, market repositioning, and process adaptation. Each of these patterns were adopted in response to an external threat. The study highlights the central role of feedback mechanisms and feedback loops that include customers, partners, and frontline employees. A core theme throughout the study was the role of leadership. Successful leaders were open to both external signals and internal insights. Feedback process played a critical role in shaping the direction and timing of these pivots.
08. Grant, A., & Sandberg, S. (2017). Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Alfred A. Knopf.
This book combines the personal crisis faced by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, with business-relevant situations presented by Adam Grant to provide a practical guide for building resilience within people’s everyday lives, families, and organizations. The relevant chapter of this book is the chapter titled “Resilience in Crisis”. In this chapter, Sanberg introduces the concept of resilience. Through the analogy of a muscle, Sanberg frames resilience as something that can be developed and trained. Framing resilience in the context of a muscle supports the concept that building resilience within organizations requires work and leaders can directly and proactively build the resilience “muscle” through their actions. This book provides a simple and practical framework for thinking about resilience outside the context of academia.
09. Jepsen, D., Sun, J. (James), & Xing, L. (2021). Feeling shame in the workplace: Examining negative feedback as an antecedent and performance and well‐being as consequences. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(9), 1244–1260. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2553
This article investigates how negative feedback in the workplace triggers the emotional response of shame, and how that emotion influences subsequent feedback-seeking behaviors. The authors use a multi-wave field study of 246 Chinese employees to show that negative feedback leads to feelings of shame, which in turn can motivate feedback-seeking and impact performance. The study identifies two key moderators: self-view (self-esteem) and goal orientation. The study shows employees with lower self-esteem or a performance-avoidance orientation are more likely to experience shame after receiving negative feedback and are less likely to seek further feedback.
Conversely, those with a learning orientation or higher self-esteem may use the emotional discomfort of shame as fuel for improvement, increasing their feedback-seeking behaviors. However, the study shows that if the sense of shame last greater than five days, feedback-seeking behaviors stop. This study demonstrates the importance of designing feedback mechanisms and feedback loops that promote positive reactions and include both sharing feedback and listening to feedback. The key point of the article is a traditional top-down feedback process will likely negatively impact an organization’s ability to be resilient and to perform in times of crisis.
10. Kirkman, B. L., Maynard, M. T., & Raetze, S., Duchek, S. (2021). Resilience in Organizations: An Integrative Multilevel Review and Editorial Introduction. Group & Organization Management, 46(4), 607–656. https://doi.org/10.1177/10596011211032129
This integrative multi-level review offers a comprehensive synthesis of resilience research across individual, team, and organizational levels. The authors frame resilience as a dynamic capacity that enables organizations and their members to absorb, adapt to, and transform through adversity. The article highlights three key areas of importance.
The first is it distinguishes between resilience as an outcome, capacity, and process. The second is it identifies the potential of feedback loops and learning mechanisms as critical enablers of resilience. The authors highlight how feedback loops improve sensemaking, error detection, adaptation, and continuous improvement. The last point is it emphasizes the interdependence across levels within the organization. In particular, it points out the importance of leadership behaviors that promote psychological safety and feedback-seeking and the importance of empowering flexible decision-making within all levels of an organization.
11. Kruse, K. (2021, September 13). How One CEO Used A ‘Friday Note’ To Foster Great Culture. Forbes.com. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2021/09/13/how-one-ceo-used-a-friday-note-to-foster-great-culture/
This article includes excerpts of an interview with Scott Dorsey, the former CEO of Exact Target. The article summarizes the importance of culture on workplace performance and investor return. A critical point covered by the author is how the use of feedback by Dorsey, known as the “Friday Note”, played a critical role in shaping the culture of Exact Target and its ability to achieve industry leading sales growth, overcome internal and external threats, and outperform its competitors. Each Friday for three years, Dorsey sent a personal companywide update that included wins, loses, and challenges. Each “Friday Note” also included proactive efforts to solicit live feedback and suggestions from the workforce, which were shared and acted upon. This article provides a real-life example of the importance of leadership feedback and feedback loops in developing resilience within organizations.
12. Lee, A. V., Vargo, J., & Seville, E. (2013). Developing a Tool to Measure and Compare
Organizations’ Resilience. Natural Hazards Review, 14(1), 29–41.
This article presents a proposal for a structured, diagnostic instrument designed to measure and compare organizational resilience across sectors called the Benchmark Resilience Tool (BRT-53). Drawing from empirical studies and stakeholder input, the authors identify 13 indicators of resilience. The indicators were grouped into two categories: planned resilience (e.g., strategies, leadership, and planning) and adaptive resilience (e.g., creativity, innovation, and agility). Although the tool was designed to assess resilience within an organization, the number of indicators, the challenge in collecting and analyzing the collected data, and the ability to transform the results into easily understood and actionable results is cumbersome. This article demonstrates the complexity and challenges leaders face when attempting to standardize the process to measure resilience within their organization.
13. Nachmanovitch, S. (2019). The art of is: Improvising as a way of life. New World Library.
This chapter more thoroughly defines listening. The author makes the case that listening is not a passive act but requires intent and focus. The author argues listening is a critical skill that needs to be developed to improve relationships within teams and between individuals. A key point throughout the chapter is listening is about being quiet and about existing in a space, while providing others the opportunity to express themselves within that same shared space. This article is relevant as it relates to the design of feedback mechanisms and feedback loops. Although feedback is an active effort to share information, the opportunity to receive feedback must also be included and the act of receiving feedback must be a deliberate act of active listening.
14. Waddoups, N. (2022). Feedback‐Driven Time Segmenting: The Effect of Feedback Frequency on Employee Behavior. Contemporary Accounting Research, 39(3), 1516–1541.
This study investigates how the frequency of performance feedback affects employee productivity by introducing the concept of Feedback-Driven Time Segmenting (FDTS). FDTS is a cognitive mechanism in which feedback acts as a trigger for individuals to mentally segment time and adjust performance expectations. In a laboratory setting, the author demonstrates that more frequent feedback improves performance by reducing the time between self-reflection points. When the time between self-reflection points is shortened, the outcome is quicker learning cycles and behavioral adjustments. The impact is shown to be more pronounced when task difficulty is high, or goal clarity is low. This study is relevant because it demonstrates that the frequency of feedback plays a critical role in changing behavior and improving learning. The design of feedback mechanism and feedback loops needs to take frequency into consideration.
15. Wang, S., & Zhang, X. (2022). Impact mechanism of supervisor developmental feedback on employee workplace learning. Managerial and Decision Economics, 43(1), 219–227.
This empirical study explores how supervisor developmental feedback influences employee workplace learning, especially under conditions of external turbulence and high-performance demand. The authors propose and test a chain mediation model in which developmental feedback stimulates expected successful performance and self-goal setting, both of which enhance learning behavior. The results from a two-stage survey of 449 Chinese professionals in the tech and services sector confirm that developmental feedback from supervisors significantly improves workplace learning. The study shows that this effect is not direct but mediated by employees first envisioning future success (a low-effort cognitive process, System 1) and then consciously setting goals (a higher-effort process, System 2). This chain mechanism illustrates how consistent and purposeful feedback can create a cognitive-emotional pathway for sustained learning, thereby reducing self-depletion and enhancing resilience.
References
Antonoaie, C., Codreanu, A., & Vasilescu, C. (2021). Resilience: A multi-level approach and its relevance for the development of organizations focused resilience frameworks. Journal of
Defense Resources Management, 12(2), 5–22.
Beenen, G., Pichler, S., & Wood, S. (2020). Feedback frequency and appraisal reactions: a meta-analytic test of moderators. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(17), 2238–2263. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2018.1443961
Bhamra, R., Burnard, K., & Tsinopoulos, C. (2018). Building Organizational Resilience: Four
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