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To keep the creative juices flowing, employees should be receptive to criticism
Researchers have been curious about whether negative feedback really makes people perform better, particularly when it comes to completing creative tasks. The literature has been mixed about this. In a recent investigation, Kim, who in May will join the Cambridge Judge Business School as an assistant professor, observed –– through a field experiment and a lab experiment –– and reported on how receiving negative feedback might impact the creativity of the recipients(接受者).
In both studies, Kim found that negative feedback can inspire or prevent creative thinking. What is most important is where the criticism comes from. When creative professionals or participants received criticism from a boss or a peer, they tended to be less creative in their subsequent work. Interestingly, if an individual received negative feedback from an employee of lower rank, they benefited from it and became more creative.
Some aspects of these findings seem intuitive(凭直觉的). “It makes sense that employees might feel threatened by criticism from their managers,” says Kim. “Supervisors have a lot of influence in deciding promotions or pay raises. So negative feedback from a boss might cause career anxieties.” It also stands to reason that feedback from a co-worker might also be received as threatening because we often compete with our peers for the same promotions and opportunities.
When we feel that pressure from above or from our peers, we tend to fixate on the stressful aspects of it and end up being less creative in our future work, says Kim.
What Kim found most surprising was how negative feedback from their followers (employees that they manage) made supervisors more creative.
“It's a bit counterintuitive(反直觉的) because we tend to believe we shouldn't criticize the boss,” says Kim. “In reality, most supervisors are willing to receive negative feedback and learn from it. It's not that they enjoy criticism –– rather, they are in a natural power position and can cope with the discomfort of negative feedback better.”
The key takeaways: bosses and coworkers need to be more careful when they offer negative feedback to someone they manage or to their peers. And feedback recipients need to worry less when it comes to receiving criticism, says Kim.
“The tough part of being a manager is pointing out a follower's poor performance or weak points. But it's a necessary part of the job,” says Kim. “If you're a supervisor, just be aware that your negative feedback can hurt your followers' creativity. Followers tend to receive negative feedback personally. Therefore, keep your feedback specific to tasks. Explain how the point you're discussing relates to only their task behavior, not to aspects of the person.”
In short, anyone who wants to offer negative feedback on the job should do so attentively and sensitively and to promote creativity at work, we should all be receptive to criticism from supervisors, peers and followers.
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To keep the creative juices flowing, employees should be receptive to criticism |
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Introduction to the topic |
Experiments are conducted to find out whether negative feedback people's performance or not. |
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Negative feedback can inspire or hold back creativity, on where the criticism comes from. |
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of the study |
Criticism from a boss or a peer creativity, while negative feedback from lower rank employees will be . |
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Our work is greatly influenced by our supervisors, so their criticism might bring about anxieties. |
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for the phenomena |
We compete with our peers for the same opportunities, thus feeling by their negative feedback. |
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Supervisors are in a favourable and can learn from their followers' negative feedback. |
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Enlightenment from the study |
When offering criticism to followers or peers, bosses and coworkers need to keep it to their tasks. |
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Recipients should adopt a positive towards others' criticism. |
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