Feedback as a Mechanism for Workplace Learning: A qualitative study of employee on-the-job learning in Fast-food, Restaurant and Retail SMEs in Umeå and Uppsala, Sweden.

Sammanfattning

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in employment, economic activity, and local business development in Sweden. Compared with larger organizations, SMEs often have less formal human resource arrangements, limited training routines and fewer standardized performance management methods. In this environment, employee learning can happen through the ordinary flow of work, through direct communication, just watching how others do things, practical problem-solving, and the feedback that appears while someone is doing the task. This thesis looks at how feedback that connects to performance can enable or, on the other hand restrict employee on-the-job learning in fast-food, restaurant, and retail SMEs in Umeå and Uppsala Sweden. The goal of the study is to examine how employees experience feedback in everyday work, and how these feedback methods affect their learning. Here, feedback is treated like a possible mechanism behind learning, not learning itself. The main research question is about how performance-related feedback practices in fast-food, restaurants, and retail SMEs enable or constrain employee on-the-job learning. Two smaller sub-questions also steer the study: first, how feedback is given in these SME work settings, and second, how employees interpret that feedback as something that supports their learning or as something that limits it. The thesis uses a qualitative research setup, based on semi-structured interviews with nine employees from fast-food, restaurant, and retail SMEs. The empirical material was then analyzed using the Gioia Method, which made it possible to move in a systematic way from participant-centered first-order concepts to researcher-centered second-order themes, and finally to aggregate dimensions. In the end, the analysis produced 80 first-order concepts, 15 second-order themes, and four aggregate dimensions, namely informal feedback practices in everyday SME work, feedback as a mechanism for learning and role development, social and emotional conditions shaping feedback reception, and relational feedback culture in small workplaces. The results indicate that, in SMEs, feedback is quite often informal, delivered immediately, focused on tasks and woven into day-to-day work. It supports learning especially when it gives clear directions, corrects errors in real time, makes role expectations visible, backs up practical skills, and is passed on in a respectful, credible way. Also, positive feedback, together with recognition, can raise motivation and confidence. Still, feedback can also limit learning when it stays vague, becomes emotionally discouraging, is inconsistent, or comes from someone employees see as not credible. The study therefore concludes that feedback in SMEs does not automatically lead to learning. Instead, feedback turns into a learning mechanism when employees understand it, accept it, and then use it in practice, within a workplace context that feels supportive and safe.