Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p2494"

Due to technological evolution, our work-culture has become more expert-focused and fast-paced. Work's fast pace and abstract assignments can lead to situations where workers can't evaluate whether their own actions are meeting the expectations. Therefore, the feedback from the other people becomes more important. Feedback enables well-being at the workplace and personal development and therefore can be associated with the work community's- and, finally, the society's operability. The feedback communication at the workplace has been somewhat studied, but also has been criticized for still being one-sided, postpositivist and carried out by the same format. The aim of this study is primarily to produce new, qualitative information about the feedback communication between superiors and their subordinates primarily for the scientific community and secondly for Yleisradio. The first research goal was to describe how subordinates define feedback. The second goal was to understand and describe those perceptions and experiences that subordinates have of their superior's feedback. This thesis was a qualitative case study, and it was carried out for public broadcasting company, Yleisradio. The study was conducted using qualitative methods. The data was collected by interviewing nine (9) employees working in Yleisradio. A semi-structured theme interview was used as a research method and the data was analyzed using thematic analysis method. The interviewees' age ranged from 25 to over 60 years and had been working at Yleisradio from four to over 40 years. Some of the interviewees were manual workers and some were working as content providers. According to the results the employees had many ways of describing feedback. Nine (9) main concepts that employees used to describe feedback were found: 1) All communication, 2) verbal feedback, 3) nonverbal feedback, 4) information sharing, 5) workplace atmosphere, 6) trust and getting work tasks, 7) self evaluation, 8) rewards and 9) silence "i.e. lack of feedback". The interviewees had multiple experiences from their superior's feedback. According to the interviewees, positive feedback was rewarding, increased work motivation and the work community's positive atmosphere. On the other hand, the positive feedback alone is not yet enough and negative feedback is needed as well in order to advance at work. According to the interviewees negative feedback could be divided into constructive and destructive feedback. Constructive feedback was seen as legitimate and work related and didn't get personal. Constructive feedback was created in a dialog and solutions were co-created. Destructive feedback was inappropriate, got too personal and the receiver of the feedback was not listened to. Destructive feedback was also tenuous, no solutions were created and there were no possibilities to improve one's performance or work. Feedback was also experienced as destructive when the person giving feedback was not considered wise or up to date on the situation at hand. The results and conclusions of this study were mostly similar with the previous feedback research. On the other hand the interviewees of this study were describing feedback in more versatile ways than had been described in earlier studies. For example, information sharing has not been part of the concept of feedback in most of the studies. In this thesis the concept of feedback has been extended to be more diverse. Although it must be noted that the data of this study was relatively small and therefore no generalizations can be made based on this study. More research is needed to be conducted on the matter to be able to generalize this study's results to apply to supervisor-subordinate feedback communication in work communities in general.

This research examines the views and experiences regarding communication about personal crisis in work communities. The focus is both in the community as a whole as well as in the individual communicational relationships. The study centralizes around the perspective of the people who experienced the crisis. Theoretical frames are home-to-work spillover and social support. Spillover means the study of how different life spheres affect one another. Social support on the other hand is the study of how people try to help each other by e.g. expressing sympathy, giving advice or offering practical assistance. This is a phenomenological study. The data was collected via online survey during July and August 2015. The study had 40 respondents with different occupational background. Analyzing method was qualitative content analysis with additional support from the more quantitative content differentiation. The results address why the people who have experienced a personal crisis want to or does not want to discuss it with their work community, who they talk to and who they don't talk to, how people felt their community reacted to the situation, what kind of support did they experience, how was the community a burden during the crisis and what kind of positive or negative views and experiences arose from the communicational relationships. One of the main results of the study is that people who have experienced a personal crisis hope that their work community expresses sympathy, understanding about their situation and offers practical support in order to reduce their work load. How people wish sympathy and understanding should be manifested differs greatly. Some hope to receive active empathy while others wish that co-workers wouldn't speak about the situation at all. Six narratives are presented based on the answers. They summarize how different people wish their work community would relate to the crisis, how they talk about the crisis themselves and how they think others react to their situation. Finally, propositions are given to organizations and work communities that wish to be prepared for the personal crisis among their members.