Progress-focused

Canadian researchers Marlee Mercer and Duygu Biricik Gulseren investigated the potentially harmful consequences of negative feedback aimed at undergraduate students ( Mercer & Gulseren, 2023 ). Performance feedback is essential in higher education, especially to support students in their learning process. Giving negative feedback can also be necessary and useful. However, negative feedback can be unintentionally harmful, especially when it is more general than constructive criticism and does not target specific behaviors.

Richard Nisbett, who I have mentioned here before , has written a brief but interesting article about the fundamental attribution error.Together with Lee Ross, he once wrote a classical book about this, The Person and the Situation . The fundamental attribution error means that we systematically underestimate the influence of situations, structures, and systems on our behavior en systematically overestimate the influence of personal traits and dispositions on our behavior. As Nisbett says it: we are, wrongly, inclined to think about human behavior in purely dispositional terms.

Coert Visser, September 9, 2013 Making progress in meaningful work is one of the most motivating factors for employees. Therefore, it is important to talk about and to describe desired and achieved progress, frequently. But did you know that negative occurrences such as setbacks and failures can have a 2 to 3 times stronger (negative) effect on motivation than positive factors? This was shown in a study by Amabile and Kramer .

There is an interesting new working paper by two Harvard Business School researchers: Toxic workers (Housman & Miner, 2015). They analyzed a large data set containing a range of information about more than 50,000 workers from 11 firms. Their analyses were aimed at gaining insight into which personal and situational circumstances lead to toxic behavior and into which effects toxic behaviors have. In the working paper they present some interesting findings and they make some recommendations for management and HR-policy. Below, I will briefly summarize the findings and add some personal remarks.

Parents, teachers, and managers play an important role for respectively children, students, and employees. They not only have a facilitating, helping role but also a directing role. They pay attention, show understanding, they help and facilitate, they give a good example and they clarify expectations and set limits. When they fulfill their role effectively, the individuals they work with will be likely to function and develop well en feel good. These individuals are likely to engage in what they find interesting and important and to behave in well-adjusted ways and offer useful contributions.

If-then planning is a technique which helps to perform specific goal-oriented behavior in situations in which it is most needed. Many people know the phenomenon that we often don't do what we wish or need to do (this is sometimes referred to as the knowing-doing gap). The problem is that while we do know what we want to achieve and we also know which behavior is effective, at the crucial moment we still fail to perform the behavior.The reason we fail to behave effectively at the critical moment may have to do with letting our emotions overwhelm us or succumbing to temptations or simply forgetting about the effective behavior when we need it.