Browsing by Author "Touhonen, Sara"

Feedback is seen as an important part of working life. Feedback is often accompanied by support and suggestions for improvement, and good feedback is accompanied by certain elements. In addition, research focuses on feedback primarily as a management tool. However, experts work often in teams and the challenge is that the supervisor does not know well enough how the employees has performed in their job. Therefore, the field of feedback research should be expanded to look at peer feedback between employees. The aim of this master’s thesis is to find out what kind of elements supporting peer feedback can be observed in the expert team and what kind of peer feedback can be found in the team. My master’s thesis has been produced according to an ethnographic research approach since the end of 2021. In a manner typical of ethnographic research, I produced the research material by observing and interviewing a team of experts. The team was part of a family-owned healthcare business and worked on dental training and consulting services for dentists. The research material consisted of four observations and three short interviews. The biggest insight of my master’s thesis was to understand how diverse, and unobtrusive process of communication peer feedback is in everyday working life. The results showed that peer feedback was provided by a team with smooth and fast paced communication, autonomy, and a confidential atmosphere. Based on the results, peer feedback in the team of experts appeared to be a widespread phenomenon. I identified seven different forms and structures of peer feedback from the research material: supportive, developing, neutral and corroborative peer feedback, receiving and asking peer feedback and strengthening peer feedback. The identified feedbacks were combined with recognizability, timing, and nonverbal and verbal form. In addition, I identified situations where employees with different amounts of work experience behave differently. In the future, it would be interesting to look more closely at how feedback behaviour differs in levels of different amount of expertise and what kind of peer feedback employees benefit most from the development of skills.