Constantinos Coutifaris and Paul Green’s research reveals a particularly potent insight. Strategically, praise and criticism should be used at different times to maximize employee performance. Analyzing data from nearly 10,000 employees at a leading consulting firm, the study indicates that leaders can optimize their emotional expressions to enhance motivation and productivity among their teams.
Their results confirm that early positive feedback enhances performance. Further, when constructive criticism is provided with perfect timing, it may motivate remarkable transformation. The study has been published in the journal Organization Science, offering valuable insights for managers seeking to maximize their team’s potential.
Study Overview and Methodology
Coutifaris and Green’s study was one of the most in-depth examinations of emotional expression in an organizational context to date. These tools helped them to deeply analyze the percentage of positive and negative words used with employees over the course of a year.
The study’s sample of 9,968 employees at a large, global consulting firm allowed the authors to ensure representation of a diverse set of perspectives. During the final evaluation period, managers rated the job performance of each employee. This type of feedback allowed researchers to make direct connections between emotional expressions and performance results.
Here’s what we learned about the importance of feedback timing. For example, a 1-point increase in positive emotional expressions from leaders predicted a notable 3.3% boost in individual performance. When leaders expressed negative emotions halfway through the evaluation period, it underscored the impact of their prior positivity. This separation in time further amplified the initial wave of positivity. Interestingly, the same 1-point increase in early positivity led to a significant 4.4% increase in performance.
The Role of Negativity in Performance Enhancement
Perhaps the most surprising research finding was that a leader’s infrequent negativity during performance reviews can actually boost the impact of positive feedback provided in advance. In reality, this negativity is actually boosting those benefits—by up to 40.8%! In our first pass of reviews, the median percentage of positive words was over 5.5%. During the mid-phase, though, the median percentage of negative words fell to a mere 0.5%. This suggests that as much as positivity is important, judiciously applied negativity is just as impactful on improving team performance.
Coutifaris notes that leaders need to be intentional about when and how they show emotions. He insists that teams should never settle and do what they need to do in order to be the best. To do so, they need to create a welcoming environment from day one. Next, they are able to wield negative emotions with greater frequency than the mean at the halfway point.
Team leaders can only elevate their teams’ performance if they first establish an uplifting environment — that’s on leaders, not teams. Once that groundwork is established, they’ll be able to start presenting insightful criticism more successfully.
Insights from Varsity Athletes
For Coutifaris and Green, exploring corporate environments became the basis for surveying 245 varsity athletes. Specifically, they examined the emotional displays of 86 coaches over the course of their sports season. Most importantly, this broader perspective lends strength to their findings that emotional feedback is an essential component in all domains.
To start, the researchers measured the prevalence of positive vs negative emotional displays by coaches in sports environments. They simply adopted a 1–5 increasing scale to perform this assessment. These feedback dynamics on professional sports teams are not so different from those in corporate boardrooms. This points to the global need for emotional leadership.
Paul Green remarked on the unexpected value of negative emotions in fostering growth: “The big surprise for me was that negative emotions are pretty valuable. They help people improve.” This practical wisdom indicates that organizational leaders need not avoid expressing dissenting emotions, as long as those emotions are purposefully conveyed at the right time.