Workplace Criticism and Positive/Negative Relationships
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rare-workers-who-thrive-on-negative-feedback-1536672180
For most employees, both the process of giving and receiving criticism at work is an unsavory process that often results in feelings of dejection and hostility for the recipient and guilt for the administrator. However, a rare subset of employees thrives on harsh feedback, actively seeking out comments from superiors and coworkers on their performance and behavior at work. The primary product of this behavior is accelerated improvement; firms have noticed this benefit, and now explicitly search out these types of people that respond especially favorably to workplace criticism during recruitment.
A workplaces’ social network can be imagined with positive and negative relationships between nodes that represent employees. Workplace criticism typically creates a negative relationship both ways as both parties seldom find enjoyment in the process. However, for those that thrive on critical feedback, positive relationships are instead created as those administering the criticism are encouraged to do so without guilt and recipients make the best of it. It is interesting to note how different nodes respond to the same situation by generating positive relationships rather than traditionally negative relationships.
The social network at the workplace can become complicated if the workers that thrive on negative feedback became that way at some point during the lifetime of their career rather than from the very beginning. Any relationships affected by workplace criticism prior to transformation remain negative while new ones are being made positive from the same trigger events. Alternatively, if the transformed node decides to forgive past critics those relationships can become vectored: positive from the critical recipient to the administrator, and negative from the administrator to the recipient.