hbr the ideal praise-to-criticism
Harvard Business Review blog article (March 15, 2013) by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman arguing that both positive and negative feedback matter but that top-performing teams display ~5.6 positive comments per negative one. It summarizes Heaphy & Losada's study of 60 leadership teams (which linked higher positive:negative ratios to better performance), presents the authors' 360-degree feedback dataset (≈50,000 leaders) showing large percentile gains among low-performing leaders who address negative feedback (average +33 percentile points), and notes a parallel with John Gottman's marital research (optimal ~5:1). The article advises leaders to model and move team interactions toward roughly a 5.6:1 praise-to-criticism ratio.
Questions this document answers
March 15, 2013
5.6 to 1
Medium ≈1.9 to 1; Low ≈0.36 to 1
60 strategic-business-unit leadership teams
About 50,000 leaders